Semperoper
Music-Master – Markus Butter
Major-Domo – Friedrich-Wilhelm Junge
Lackey – Peter Lobert
Officer – Michael Auenmüller
Composer – Barbara Senator
Tenor/Bacchus – Burkhard Fritz
Wigmaker – Matthias Henneberg
Zerbinetta – Romy Petrick
Prima Donna, Ariadne – Marjorie Owens
Dancing Master – Timothy Oliver
Naiad – Emily Dorn
Dryad – Julia Mintzer
Echo – Arantza Ezenarro
Harlequin – Sebastian Wartig
Scaramuccio – Gerald Hupach
Truffaldino – Tilmann Rönnebeck
Brighella – Aaron Pegram
Marco Arturo Marelli (director, set
designs)
Dagmar Niefind-Marelli (costumes)
It is difficult for Ariadne auf Naxos to go too wrong,
though Katharina Thoma managed to do so in her dreadful staging for Glyndebourne last year. That said, it remains a pleasure and an
estimable pleasure at that, when it goes right, which for the most part it did
here in the Straussian paradise of Dresden. Marco Arturo Marelli’s production
has been around for a while – it appears on DVD, from the loving hands of Sir
Colin Davis – but in no sense does it seem tired. Whilst dispensing with undue viennoserie, it is faithful to the
spirit and idea of the work, set here in a modern art gallery: in many ways a
more apt contemporary milieu than the musical world would be. As a friend
remarked, the patron is just the sort of person who would buy a Damien Hirst.
Indeed, nowadays, he would be far more likely to do that than to commission an
opera. The ‘opera’ proper thus takes place on an island installation, around
which the fashionable habitués of an exhibition opening night drift. (There are
suitably dreadful paintings surrounding on the walls too.) Marelli’s staging is not cynical, though;
whilst there is plenty of fun to be had concerning the ghastliness of modern patronage,
it is not overdone, and one of the joys of the production is also to see how
some spectators, not least a lady next to whom Zerbinetta seats herself for
part of her big aria, respond to the proceedings, and in some cases partake in
Hofmannsthal’s – and Strauss’s – transformation. Personenregie, designs, and concept alike work well, both in theory
and in practice. In that respect, it is worth mentioning that the Komparserie does an excellent job
throughout. I did not care for the Composer’s running off with Zerbinetta at
the end: far better to have that Prologue Augenblick
as just that, but by the same token, it is a directorial indulgence that can be
lived with.
The Staatskapelle Dresden is of course
the Strauss orchestra par excellence,
at least as much as its cousin in Vienna. Whether one thinks of Böhm, Kempe,
Thielemann, or others, it would be difficult not to think of a favourite
Strauss recording made here. Here the orchestra was on fine form throughout,
variegated of tone, responding to the manner born to Strauss’s quicksilver
transformations of colour and harmony. Conductor Omer Meir Wellber proved an estimable Kapellmeister: not necessarily fashioning new insights, but
permitting the score’s delights to speak for themselves, and Strauss’s line to
develop unimpeded. For something really special here, we may return to Sir
Colin – his bust proudly on display here at the Semperoper – on DVD.
There was an excellent sense
of company: apt in this of all works. Not all of the singing may have matched
great assumptions of the past – has it ever matched Karajan’s recording? – but one
could hardly expect that. Marjorie Owens proved a graceful, often moving Ariadne:
a few falterings here and there, but nothing serious. Burkhard Fritz offered a
little too much in the way of Tenor bluster, hectoring at times, but one can
readily incorporate that into the work’s metatheatricality. If Barbara Senator’s
Composer was less individual of tone than of stage presence, there was nothing
too much to complain about either. Romy
Petrick’s Zerbinetta was a joy: precise, lovable, and touching at those tender
moments too. Equally impressive was a fine female trio of Naiad, Dryad, and
Echo: Emily Dorn, Julia Mintzer, and Arantza Ezenarro. Their fabulous costumes
were matched by assured singing and acting,
offering quite the model of an Ariadne
performance.
