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| (c) Cory Weaver/Metropolitan Opera |
This has been a good spring for Strauss at the Met. After a
luxurious Capriccio, we get
Ariadne auf Naxos with an incredible cast under the baton of Fabio Luisi. Luisi's passionate, precise conducting was a joy, evoking the disparate characters of the prologue's bustling drama, and opening out into glorious, sweeping lyricism when this was called for. I'm not an
Ariadne-expert, but I thought the orchestra was appropriately knowledgeable and gently ironic as well. (Parenthetically, I was seated between a lady who knows the opera backwards and loves it passionately, and the personal trainer of one of the cellists, who was hearing it for the first time. We all loved it.) Elijah Moshinsky's production--pictures from previous runs
here and
here--I thought very successful in the prologue. The opulence of the house was established, there was not-too-broad comic business for the Tenor and Prima Donna, and a detailed treatment of both relations within the comic troupe and the group of musicians, and the increasingly hostile relationship between the factions. I wasn't entirely sure how much of the opera staging was supposed to be taken seriously; it seemed to me that Moshinsky was choosing to amplify its ambiguities, rather than interpret them. I did like the treatment of the constellations and the presentation of Najade, Dryade, and Echo, but I thought the opening up and closing of various layers of cloud backdrops got to be a bit much. Still, the finale was musically
glorious.
