Salzburg Festival (5) - Ariadne auf Naxos, 24 August 2026

Haus für Mozart

Images: © SF/Thomas Aurin

Composer – Kate Lindsey
Primadonna, Ariadne – Christina Nilsson
Tenor, Bacchus – Eric Cutler
Zerbinetta – Ziyi Dai
Major-domo – Johannes Silberschneider
Music Master – Christoph Pohl
Dancing Master – Jonas Hacker
Harlequin – Leon Košavić
Scaramuccio – Michael Porter
Truffaldino – Lukas Enoch Lemcke
Brighella – Theodor Browne
Naiad – Jasmin Delfs
Driad – Ana Mittermüller
Echo – Marlene Metzger
Wigmaker – Blaž Stajnko
Lackey – Fabian-Jakob Balkhausen
Officer – Fabio Dorizzi
Dancers – Ashley Elexandra Wright, Yume Takojima, Anton Ruslanovych, Samuel Young-Wright
Actors – Leo Albertini, Maximilian Montag, Martin Preiner, Paridam Schneider, Christian Walker

Director, designs, costumes – Ersan Mondtag
Lighting – Franck Evin
Choreography – Ashley Alexandra Wright
Video – Alexander Pannier
Dramaturgy – Till Briegleb

Assistant designer – Lorenz Paul Stöger  

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Manfred Honeck (conductor)

A musically outstanding Ariadne auf Naxos, as well played as any I have heard, was here alas let down by a frankly idiotic staging, directed by the recently fashionable ‘interdisciplinary artist’ Ersan Mondtag. Let me resume the good musical news, which was very good indeed. I am not sure I had heard Manfred Honeck conduct an opera before, although in addition to serving as Music Director in Stuttgart for several years, he will have played in many as a violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic, here led by his brother Rainer. Doubtless it did no harm to be ‘one of them’, for the musicians clearly trusted and responded to him as they would to few others, combining a sense of chamber music writ large with unassuming yet unquestionable musical flexibility and direction. Harmony and counterpoint combined in near-Mozartian balance in an orchestra of soloists. Rarely if ever have I heard so much of the score, inner string parts in particular: not simply for its own sake, but musically and thereby dramatically enriching the drama. Tristan in particular could be heard informing various passages of the Opera proper: not only in the obvious, intertextual ways, but in those string textures, their direction, and their potentiality. This may not have been a brazenly modernistic Strauss, but then this is a particular work with its own brand of neoclassicism avant la lettre: one rooted in, yet in no sense hidebound by, tradition, and with frames of historical reference in almost any direction one might care to take, not least what we call the French Baroque (though ‘Classicism’ arguably makes greater sense). I can pay Honeck’s direction no greater compliment than to say I should love to hear him in a Mozart or Wagner opera, or indeed more Strauss. And if he can encourage this orchestra to play like that, he should definitely conduct more opera in Salzburg and Vienna.

 

With this of all operas, we need to keep several operatic balls in the air at the same time, and show ourselves to be doing so. Whatever nonsense they were called to by the director, the singers shone vocally bright indeed. Christina Nilsson, served particularly ill by Mondtag’s designs, nevertheless offered a thoughtful, radiant performance as Ariadne. At one point, I found myself wondering wishing the late Jessye Norman had been cast, in order to put the production where it deserved, but otherwise I was more than happy with her successor. Ziyi Da was a delight from beginning to end as Zerbinetta, her coloratura responding perfectly to the needs of a drama both necessarily italicised and natural. If I have heard a better Music Master than Christoph Pohl, I have forgotten him, which seems unlikely. A warmly Wagnerian baritone, with just the right amount of ironic distance, sounded just what Hofmannsthal and Strauss had ordered. If it is difficult to wax too lyrical about a Bacchus, that reflects the thanklessness of the role; Eric Cutler did all that was asked for him and more. Jonas Hacker’S Dancing Master, Leon Košavić’s Harlequin, the euphonious trio of Jasmin Delfs, Ana Mittermüller, and Marlene Metzger: these and others all attested to casting from depth, repaid in intelligence, good humour, and tonal warmth. A host of dancers and actors did well what presumably had been asked of them too.

 

I have left to the end Kate Lindsey’s Composer, not because she proved an exception, but because her character, alas, leads us directly to Mondtag’s staging. If, to begin with, I found her singing a touch on the harsh side, it blossomed into one of the most moving accounts of Strauss’s paean to music I have heard. It is one of those unmistakeable moments when the master of musical masks lets his slip, or at least has us think it does, and had me in tears. (The Vienna Philharmonic was at least an equal partner here of course.) But the reason, I suspect, I had taken longer to warm to her performance was that she had been landed with having to play the Composer not as a successor to Cherubino, but rather as a strangely dressed, ‘uptight’ middle-aged woman with a twitch. In offering what she did, Lindsey probably did precisely what had been asked for, prior to casting caution to the winds. That was not the worst of it, by any means. In what came across, rightly or wrongly, as crass misogyny, this woman was enabled, during the Opera, to ‘loosen up’ with the aid of a spliff or two, Zerbinetta removing the Composer’s top so that she could wander haplessly around the stage in her bra, prior to tentatively joining in one of the most tedious all-in orgies you will ever have the misfortune to observe. ‘Großmächtige Prinzessin…’ was sung to the Composer, not Ariadne, who had vanished.

The attempt, as New Labour might have had it, to sex up Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s dodgy dossier was often embarrassing, but always dull and increasingly so. Where the Prologue’s setting, on a spaceship flown to Mars, with a variety of peculiarly dressed people, had merely irritated but had not especially got in the way, the Opera suggested a supreme lack of interest on the part of the production team in anything remotely connected with the work, let alone its musical and verbal text. Characters from the Prologue wandered around to no particular end, as if in search of a bus that alas was never coming. Curiously joyless sex, with a bias towards revelation of the male form, carried on throughout. For some reason or none, Zerbinetta and her troupe either – according to taste – took the controls of the spaceship or engaged in a television quiz show. 

Finally, Bacchus arrived as a golden spaceman, to leave with Ariadne, only to have the Major-Domo press a button and explode their ship: closing fireworks of a sort, I suppose, though it felt unmotivated. If the argument, as seemed suggested in the dramaturge’s programme note, were that this was offering a contemporary critique of artistic patronage, it failed in its aim, let alone in presenting any idea, Strauss’s, Hofmannsthal’s, or anyone else’s, of transformation. But if that were being offered, perhaps some consideration might have been given to which version of the opera would be presented. Only a little better thought out than the production, this note gave the impression of not even having appreciated this was an issue, referring baldly to the ‘premiere’ in Vienna in 1916. Sebastian Bolz’s accompanying essay was, by contrast, excellent: a model introduction to the work. 

As the celebrated Turkish proverb has it, when a clown moves into a palace, he does not become the sultan; the palace becomes a circus. I suspect the production team would claim their work was ‘about’ this relationship rather than simple evidence of it. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong with a circus or the idea of one, though it is hardly to be equated to the commedia dell’arte. It is not, though, suited to everything—especially when it never leaves the shallows of a mere ‘look’. Achim Freyer’s (almost) one-size-all approach could become wearing, but there was no doubting his craft, his pursuit of an idea, his ability to conjure up a new world within the confines of his aesthetic, and the theatrical magic he could, at his best, create. His Magic Flute, which I saw for the first time here in Salzburg in 1999, was a case in point: perhaps still the most memorable and magical I have seen. If you have never seen so much as a still from a low-budget 70s sci-fi series and would happily see it irrelevantly created on stage, seasoned with a torrent of aimless dry-humping observed by an occasional refugee from the land of Teletubbies, Zirkus Mondtagi will decamp next summer to Bayreuth for Big Top Parsifal.

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Idomeneo, 5 July 2024

Nationaltheater

Images © Wilfried Hösl

  

Idomeneo – Pavol Breslik
Idamante – Emily D’Angelo
Ilia – Olga Kulchynska
Elettra – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Arbace – Jonas Hacker
High Priest of Neptune – Liam Bonthrone
The Voice (Oracle) – Alexander Köpeczi

Antú Romero Nunes (director)
Dustin Klein (choreography)
Phyllida Barlow, Nina Schöttl (set designs)
Victoria Behr (costumes)
Michael Bauer (lighting)
Rainer Karlitschek (dramaturgy)
Catharina von Bülow (revival director)

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (director: Christoph Heil)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Ivor Bolton (conductor)

Take a stroll around central Munich and you may come upon a plaque on Altenhofstrasse indicating the spot where Mozart lived in the winter of 1780-81 whilst at work on Idomeneo. The opera was written for the Residenztheater, now generally known as the Cuvilliés-Theater, although now we saw it at the Nationaltheater, home since its 1818 opening to most of the Bavarian Court – latterly the State – Opera’s activities. Both theatres were eventually rebuilt after Allied bombing, although Mozart’s apartment building was destroyed for good in 1944.  A different staging of Idomeneo would have been required to go ‘home’, for Antú Romero Nunes’s 2021 production certainly makes use of the larger stage and space, but that did not entirely negate a sense of homecoming, not least given memories of a fine concert encircling and presaging the work at last year’s Munich Opera Festival, in the ‘original’ venue. 

Why inverted commas? Perhaps they represent a fussiness too far, given how much any old building will have been rebuilt over the years, although the old theatre did have to be rebuilt from scratch, finally reopening in 1958, not with Idomeneo but with Le nozze di Figaro. Idomeneo was still then a great rarity and remains, to many of us bafflingly so, less popular than any other of Mozart’s seven ‘mature’, full-scale operas. (Many of us may be inclined to soften the distinction drawn there, but it continues to hold for opera companies and their general public.) Given the total break in its performance history – unlike that of, say, Figaro – we might say that any performance becomes more of a reconstruction too, irrespective of intention. The work is often cut and if, at least in a good performance, one feels the loss, it can also work in truncated form within reason. This version – and I think one can go so far as to use that word – had, however, some highly unusual, even unprecedented textual features, some to my mind more justifiable than others. Old and new, fidelity and reimagination, text and performance, music and drama: these do not necessarily stand opposed, but their relationships have also never been without friction. If part of the interest lies in that friction, difficulties may also lie therein. On this occasion, it would be fair to say that we experienced both. 

Action prior to the overture is now a commonly accepted, albeit perhaps now all too common, theatrical strategy. It is more unusual to open with stage music interpolated from elsewhere, a feature throughout the production. What we saw and heard, though, intrigued, largely due, I think, to Phyllida Barlow’s arresting set designs, verging on an installation in themselves. Here, at the beginning, in a dark and dangerous port, musicians and dancers set the scene in several ways, solo- and ensemble-human fragility contrasting with the elemental sea implied scenically and musically, as the Overture proper came upon us. Quite why Nunes felt the need to project ‘titles’ as it unfolded, I am not sure. I suppose it let people know who the characters were and who was singing their parts, but beyond that it achieved little. In retrospect, the lack of dramatic motivation, in spite of a lot ‘going on’, proved too prophetic. Beyond the striking, meaningful ‘look’ – one could read much into Barlow’s structures, above all the sheer mysteriousness of the realm of the gods – Nunes seemed to have little to say. The performance progressed, but that was about it, save for a strange marriage of interpolations and cuts, recitative predictably suffering most. Of politics there was little sign, but nor did the lack of drama and sense of installation seem to be an overt aesthetic, as in the case of Romeo Castellucci. 

Idomeneo (Pavol Breslik) and Arbace (Jonas Hacker)

Perhaps most indefensible – not the first time it has reared its head in a Mozart opera – was a fortepiano rendition of the D minor Fantasia, KV 397/385g, shorn of its turn to the major mode (by whomever), which provided the opportunity for further ballet music, probably suggestive of the relationship between Idamante and Ilia, though I was not always clear whether dance were intended as pantomime or in the older, ‘Italian’ tradition. ‘Perhaps’, because it was run close by the surprise arrival of the aria, ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te … Non temer, amato bene’, KV 505, for Idamante and, you guessed it, obbligato fortepiano. Emily D’Angelo sang it very well, but neither its tenuous connection with the opera nor dramatic momentum was well served. 

The worst decision, though, was to fade out ‘Torna la pace’, musicians onstage imitating Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. What could the director have been thinking of? And what could any conductor – presumably not Ivor Bolton, who did not conduct the premiere – have been thinking of, permitting such a radical step without any discernible motivation? Pity poor Pavol Breslik as Idomeneo, who then had to set though the concluding ballet music eating a sandwich, as dancers, more furries than Furies, did their thing. Martin Kušej’s 2014 production for Covent Garden, much misunderstood at the time and sadly unrevived, showed quite how this extraordinary music can grip as drama (and despite an indifferent musical performance). This, alas, simply became tedious. 

Bolton’s musical direction did not help in that respect. It certainly had its moments over the evening as a whole, but the problem was that they were mostly moments. It cannot have been helped by the ‘version’ with which he was presumably presented, but a greater sense of dramatic pulse could readily have been achieved, as could more generous vibrato for the strings and less ‘period’ rasping from the brass. Trombones, though, sounded splendidly otherworldly for the Oracle. Occasional discrepancies between stage and pit, especially during choruses, were swiftly and tidily resolved. The array of continuo instruments was odd, as well as choices made as when to use them; however well played, the presence of a theorbo made little sense. A wind machine, though, offered a nod both to older stagecraft and to onstage atmosphere. 

The greatest satisfaction for me was to be had from the singing. For me, a highlight was the beginning of the third act, Olga Kulchynska’s ‘Zeffiretti lusinghieri’ and the quartet the other side of KV 505 vocally breathtaking and dramatically very much on point. The four singers’ coming together could not have spelled  fear and fate more clearly. Breslik’s assumption of the title role was beyond reproach, ringing in musical security yet permitting of doubt and nuance in character. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller’s Elettra was very good too, though there was a strange moment in her final aria in which she seemed to pause; it was unclear to me whether this were a demand of the production, an interpretative strategy, or something else. Indeed, throughout, her character seemed strangely minimised by the production. Jonas Hacker’s Arbace made the most of both his arias, as did Liam Bonthrone and Alexander Köpeczi in their smaller roles. The chorus likewise made a fine impression, hinting at a greater meaning that seemingly eluded the director.

Munich Opera Festival (1) - Così fan tutte, 17 July 2023

Nationaltheater

Fiordiligi – Louise Alder
Dorabella – Avery Amereau
Guglielmo/Gulielmo – Konstantin Krimmel
Ferrando – Sebastian Kohlhepp/Jonas Hacker
Despina – Sandrine Piau
Don Alfonso – Johannes Martin Kränzle

Benedict Andrews (director)
Magda Willi (set designs)
Victoria Behr (costumes)
Mark Van Denesse (lighting)
Katja Leclerc (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus director: Kamila Akhmedjanova)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

 

Images: ©Wilfried Hösl
Don Alfonso (Johannes Martin Kränzle), Despina (Sandrine Piau)

  

It is refreshing to find a Così fan tutte that takes the very greatest of Mozart and Da Ponte’s three masterpieces (for the most part) seriously. The amount of nonsense I have seen and heard said of it at least matches that for Don Giovanni. That the nonsense may be genuinely ‘felt’ is neither here nor there, we are not supposed to say that; uninformed misunderstanding is just that, whether it concern an artwork, politics, or particle physics.

Benedict Andrews’s production takes its lead, as probably must any serious attempt, from the work’s subtitle, La scuola degli amanti (‘The School for Lovers’). It opens with Don Alfonso in a black mask – contemporary fetish rather than classic Venetian (or Neapolitan) – taking candid Polaroid snaps of Despina. His lair has all the anonymity of a hotel room, though it may be some similarly liminal space: an empty office or flat, for instance—empty, that is, save for the mattress. He is no pimp, though, at least not conventionally. It appears to be as much a game, perhaps instruction, as anything else, for he does as he seems to have promised, destroying the evidence. When Gulielmo (the spelling used here) and Ferrando arrive, full of young, male confidence and concomitant naïveté, they fool around with Alfonso’s toys, but it is he who will instruct them. According to a programme interview with Andrews and music director Vladimir Jurowski, the two have their ‘own fantasy concerning him to develop: Don Alfonso therein is Don Giovanni’s elder brother, who however never had the sex appeal and courage of his younger brother.’ I only read Jurowski’s claim afterwards, so it played no role in my understanding of what I saw; nor should it have done, since it does not seem to be presented onstage. It is perhaps, though, worth mentioning out of interest, and to show that, quite rightly, both Andrews and Jurowski understand Così as following on from Don Giovanni. For what it is worth, I do not think Don Alfonso ‘needs’, at least on a tactical level, to be so irresistible as Don Giovanni; he has other strengths, is in some respects subtler, and is a survivor. But it is true: he is more limited, and probably must be, in order that the lovers may grow. 

Andrews and his ingenious Alfonso, Johannes Martin Kränzle, take the lovers through the requisite trials. We are not, after all, so far away from Die Zauberflöte, if heading in the opposite direction, as many might think. (At the very least, we might do well to consider ‘love’ in the latter work through the former’s prism, rather as Wagner tells us we must Die Meistersinger via Tristan’s.) They happen more or less as they should, though sometimes with a degree of viewing that is perhaps important to the framing, though could probably be left aside in the name of clarity and elimination of narrative confusion. That may, of course, not be the priority, but there is a danger, intriguingly if somewhat frustratingly also apparent in the musical direction of pushing the work beyond an ideal minimum of coherence—at least for me.

Some devices arguably work better than others. (The double entendre was not initially intended, yet seems apt enough to welcome to the show.) Sudden appearance of something esembling an underground walkway, replete with direct yet unenlightening graffiti such as ‘TITS’ and ‘My penis is huge’, added little; it quickly disappeared. An inflatable, Disney-like castle, first seen in miniature, then blown up undercutting (unnecessarily?) Ferrando’s ‘Un’aura amoroso’, is subsequently restored to suggest gateway orifices and turret protusions. That sort of works, and has a winning, Alfonso-like cynicism to it, although Andrews’s inability to go beyond Alfonso is perhaps a problem. Indeed, I suggest ‘unnecessarily’ because where Andrews for me unquestionably errs is in insistence that the ‘love’ on offer here must only be erotic, or perhaps better in a delimitation of the ‘erotic’ that the Christianity of both Mozart and Da Ponte – something neither Andrews nor Jurowski seems to accept – would always rightly deny. Across Europe and beyond, even in France, not only religion but the Church stood at the very heart of the Enlightenment. 

Gulielmo (Konstantin Krimmel), Fiordiligi (Louise Alder), Don Alfonso

That Andrews offers a garden – an open goal so often missed by directors – is a definite advantage; for me, it recalled, if without the cruel yet magical fantasy, the sadomasochistic delights of Hans Neunefels’s Salzburg production in 2000 (the first I saw). Pathways, petals, and the liberation of being outside – the ‘Zephyrs’ libretto and score present so eloquently and enticingly included – deserve better than the casual omission they often suffer. 

The crucial thing about teaching, of course, is that good pupils will go beyond their teachers. The violent anger Gulielmo and Ferrando show towards Fiordiligi and Dorabella at the close is shocking for all manner of reasons, starting with the fact that the wager was theirs, not their lovers’. This extremely powerful moment, when one wants to avert one’s eyes yet cannot, indeed should not, will linger long in the mind. But it is, of course, through musical means, through Mozart, that the lovers surpass their instructor. Don Alfonso, who arguably has least musical character of his own – partly a reflection on the singer for whom Mozart wrote, but also an opportunity, not least to go beyond Da Ponte – takes them forward yet could never comprehend what they and we have learned or, at least, been confronted with. That this ultimate truth is lacking in the staging is no bad thing, though the programme interview does not necessarily suggest awareness of it, for it is arguably something to be musically rather than scenically realised. (I see no reason why it should not be both, and indeed every reason given the musical inattentiveness of most audiences why it should, but that is a slightly different matter.) There were some strange textual choices, but no version is forever; it is not as if we shall never have chance to hear another Così.

Don Alfonso, Dorabella (Avery Amereau)

 

What, then, of Jurowski? I heard him conduct relatively little Mozart in London, a little more Haydn, so I had no particular preconceptions. There is, on this evidence, no doubting the thoughtfulness of his approach. Nothing is taken for granted; everything has clearly been considered, perhaps on occasion a little too considered. (Am I asking the impossible? Utter spontaneity, whilst taking the work as seriously as it deserves? Perhaps, but that is part, at least, of the Mozartian riddle.) There were some strange textual choices, but no version is forever; it is not as if we shall never have chance to hear another Così. Tempi were varied: some a little odd to my ears: I have never heard ‘Soave sia il vento’ taken anything like so quickly. Yet, even when in a hurry – and there was a good amount of lingering too – Jurowski did not harry. It was, perhaps, a little like what Nikolaus Harnoncourt might have managed, had he had a better sense of harmonic rhythm. There was fussiness, for instance in some strange tailing off of pieces, but there remained a sense of the greater whole, and also a delight in instrumental colour, especially from the woodwind. The use of period trumpets and drums is something I recall from his LPO Haydn; here, he made a better case for it than there, though it is neither something I like nor understand. 

Far more troubling, I am afraid, was the hopelessly exhibitionist continuo playing. One might have hoped this fad had reached its ne plus ultra with René Jacobs, but it seems alas we still have some way to go. Here the fortepianist – harpsichordists generally seem more sparing – never missed an opportunity to signal his presence. The odd witty or even would-be-witty aside is fine, but taking us into the realm of ‘easy listening’, with frankly inappropriate and anything but ‘period’ harmonies, is rather less so. It has nothing to do with Mozart; this is not where his music ‘leads’. And it is not what continuo playing is for. Matters were not helped through much of the performance by pervasive electronic interference: perhaps from a hearing aid. Doubtless the person concerned had no idea, but it made for very difficult listening at times. Mozart may or may not lead to Stockhausen, but the concept would need to be more fully realised. 

An excellent cast did everything that was asked for it and more. Louise Alder’s Fiordiligi, spun from finest Egyptian cotton, was equally possessed of due heft and spirt. That her second-act aria suffered both from that interference and from something less forgivable, premature applause, did not detract from her achievement. Avery Amereau made for a splendid counterpart as Dorabella, properly different in character and very much an enthusiast once fully enrolled in Don Alfonso’s ‘school’. I doubt anyone has ever had to do quite what she did whilst singing ‘È amore un ladroncello’, but she graduated with flying (orgasmic) colours. Konstantin Krimmel’s Gulielmo was dark, dangerous, even impetuous, yet always fully in vocal control. Sebastian Kohlhepp was unwell, though one would never have known from his excellent first-act performance; after the interval, though, he continued to act, whilst ensemble member Jonas Hacker put on an equally excellent vocal performance, splendidly at ease with Da Ponte as well as Mozart, from the wings. Sandrine Piau’s knowing, fun-loving, easily intelligent Despina will surely have been loved by all. And as master of ceremonies, Kränzle brought a typical match of musical and dramatic intelligence to his role. It was his school, after all: we followed his lead and felt a properly Mozartian twinge of regret when he was no longer required.