Opera Reviews
29 March 2024
Untitled Document

A Scottish take on Ariadne auf Naxos



by Catriona Graham
Strauss, R: Ariadne auf Naxos
Scottish Opera
April 2018

A burlesque singer in white tie, top hat and tails does a strip to reveal a red and gold spangly leotard. Every move is punctuated with silken trills. With a red ostrich feather fan attached as a ‘tail’ she swings on a trapeze, alluring a young man in officer’s whites. Yes, it’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’s opera on Hugo von Hoffmansthal’s libretto, in a co-production by Scottish Opera and Investec Opera Holland Park, directed and designed by Antony McDonald.

The set is the lawns of a big house of the richest man in Glasgow – why? Isn’t it rather patronising to relocate productions to our ‘ain kailyaird’, as if we were incapable of imagining anywhere else exists? Thus Eleanor Bron, in the speaking role of the Party Planner, affects a posh Scots accent. She bickers over the evening’s entertainment with Sir Thomas Allen’s Professor, there to support his student, the Composer.

Composer, Julia Spörsen is a rather intense young woman, over-wrought before the premiere of her opera. More Prima Donna than Mardi Byers, she strikes attitudes and throws what look very like tantrums, appalled by the cabaret, incandescent when the revised running order has opera and cabaret performed concurrently; money talks, and both performances are paid for.

Zerbinetta (Jennifer France), and her four male co-performers are unfazed by the change. The Producer (Jamie MacDougall) declares Zerbinetta is always herself on stage; in conversation with the Composer, she says that no-one knows what she is really like. She gently mocks the Composer’s concept of one Great Love and allows the Composer to snog her.

Auf Naxos, with a stage floor mirroring the building, Ariadne  (Mardi Byers) bewails her misery and invites death in the person of Hermes, while Naiad, Dryad and Echo (Elizabeth Cragg, Laura Zigmantaite and Lucy Hall), elegant as debutantes in New Look ball gowns, note her distress. Zerbinetta and her men erupt on to the stage, where the men start spinning, and juggling plates - thanks to Joe Dieffenbacher’s circus skills training – while Zerbinetta tries to convince Ariadne that all women are lovelorn until the next god comes along.

The unresponsive Ariadne takes herself off to a cave, but Zerbinetta carries on – see strip, above – relishing her power over men. If France is a little under-powered in the Prologue, she comes into her own in the Opera, with those silken trills and bravura high notes seducing the audience as much as Alex Otterburn’s Harlequin. The others – two in mock-strongman long-johns, the third in Greek national costume (Eigan Llyr Thomas, Daniel Norman and Lancelot Nomura) – are jealous, but easily got rid of.

Eventually Bacchus (Kor-Jan Dusseljee) arrives, looking for Circe and, in a case of doubly-mistaken identity, Ariadne finds her new god. Bacchus’ kiss transforms them both, though Ariadne thinks she has died at last. All thus ends happily with fireworks during the curtain calls.

Conductor Brad Cohen brings out the varied textures and colours of Strauss’s score, even if the contrast between Ariadne’s high tragedy and Zerbinetta’s low comedy is not so pronounced to 21st century ears.

Text © Catriona Graham
Photo © Richard Campbell
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