Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of “The Odyssey” may promise “three hours of head-spinning storytelling”, said Neil Fisher in The Times. But “when it comes to immersive Greek myth, nothing beats Richard Strauss in full surround sound in the final 15 minutes of ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’”.
Written in 1912, the opera tells the story of the eponymous Cretan princess who is abandoned by Theseus on a desert island with only nymphs for company, before falling in love with the god Bacchus. She had mistaken him for Death, but “that’s not really important. What matters is the moment shortly before the end when you can hear Strauss push the throttle and fire up the engines, and we bathe in the power of a soaring tenor, ecstatic soprano and coruscating orchestra”. I have never heard this scene performed with such virtuosity as in Glyndebourne’s “rapturous” new production. Catch it if you can.
It’s hard to imagine where you could find “more exciting singing” than that of David Butt Philip (as Bacchus) and Rachel Willis-Sørensen (Ariadne) in the latter stages of this “delight”, said Richard Fairman in the Financial Times. The production does not see director Laurent Pelly at his most imaginative, and Massimo Troncanetti’s “spartan designs are unappealing (Ariadne’s desert island is an even more miserable lump of rock than the plot demands)”. But the singing is just superb and the music is a joy. Conductor Robin Ticciati, and players from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, expertly capture both the score’s Rococo wit and its rousing Wagnerian grandeur.
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“Ariadne auf Naxos” is an opera of two parts, said Erica Jeal in The Guardian. Before we get to Naxos, there’s a long satirical prologue, set in Vienna, about the difficulties of putting on an opera. This first part (added four years after the opera was first performed), finds the director “at his witty best”, and features a host of nicely judged comic performances. The second half is certainly well performed but it is “less sparky and less insightful than the first”. The upshot is an evening that is “enjoyable” but ultimately “unmoving”.
Glyndebourne, Lewes. Until 29 August.
