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The music is permeated with unusually intelligent wit and irony, but there is no shortage of melody either. It’s about Ariadne with a comedic element. In the prologue, serious artists are asked to put on a performance in the house of a wealthy patron along with a group of comedians who play the composer of the play about Ariadne. In the second story, which takes place on the island of Naxos, where the abandoned Ariadne mourned, the comedians respond to her feelings with their pragmatic approach to life. And Strauss put it this way: the mesalliance of high and low works surprisingly.
Last year, New York’s Metropolitan Opera sent the opera to the cinema. And even his performance had some flaws, it was significantly better than what took place on the stage of the Estates Theater. Strauss’s music is always considered colorful, stirring, sophisticated, the same applies to the Kammerariadne, but the orchestra, in which Robert Jindra, otherwise the music editor of the National Theater Opera, was in charge, did not have much intoxicating charm. This meant that the orchestra wasn’t playing and he had suddenly just started learning.
Spit out the channel
Director Slva Daubnerov followed the basic rule of everyday opera directing: the main thing is not what is in the original. The prologue is played on an empty stage, as if between two curtains, one in front that rises and one behind with several doors leading to it. It is supposed to symbolize the theater within the theater, which this opera certainly is in its own way, but from the theater’s perspective it seems like emptiness, outside the characters move chaotically.
At two o’clock in the evening, Ariadne’s island is stylized into a room with a bed and a television, which Theseus probably left there. And again he ran back and forth under someone in a small space and crawled across the bed. The man follows Ariadne, the comedians, the nymphs, and instead of wandering into the garden and enjoying a long fireplace and tragedies, one can only imagine that they are quite busy there. The Estates Theater was supposed to appear again, so nothing could be invented for it.
Instead of the characters from the comedy Dellarte, the comedians are dressed in eye-catching cowboy costumes in which they have come specially from some television show. But for? So where did all this take place if not in the home of a wealthy 19th century European man like Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hoffmansthal?
Richard Strauss: Ariadne and Naxu
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National Theater, premiere on January 19th at Stavovský divadle
Bacchus first awakens a new love in Ariadne, has to sail on a boat to Naxos, and with Strauss it is a musically impressive appearance that has a powerful theatrical effect in the truest sense of the word (of course this does not have to be literal and literal). However, here Bacchus is so inconspicuous that he got out of the general confusion, although the hunter in his striking red skin does not know whether Ariadne asked you to make a television. In the end, the two new lovers prosaically fall into the abyss so they can sail away through the canal.
In addition to the television, there was something in it that the audience could not distinguish from behind, from the director’s traditional realms you could see the reproduction of characters (this time all the laughter surrounds the double figure of the composer, but I can’t understand it as usual) or a video projection that probably won’t please anyone.
Toto, an opera
But everything is said with beer eyes, D Pet and Pi Premium weren’t the worst experience. There were guest appearances in the roles of Ariadne (dramatic soprano and mezzo-soprano), Bacchus (tenor) and comedian Zerbinetta (coloratura soprano). The sounds that came from the apparitions had nothing to do with the opera genre and perhaps not even with the modern musical genre based on natural musical expression.
But the soprano Cornelia Beskowov, like Ariadne, has shaped and carved out a fierce, sharp face that has, in the truest sense of the word, penetrated the centuries with forgiveness. The German soprano Ziyi Dai drank heavily with her right throat as Zerbinetta, probably under the impression that this was an effective coloratura. No. And the Danish tenor Magnus Vigilius, as Bacchkus, gave a flat, mediocre, basically decayed sound; there was nothing youthfully heroic about it.
That’s ultimately their problem, that you sing like that. But how can they get involved in the first Czech scene? Although there has been a decline in the art of opera around the world, even on big evenings you can hear bizarre singing, but that is no excuse for the National Theater! Can’t Opera Per Boye Hansen find a singer in his own theater who would sing these roles at least a little better? Then he doesn’t play Ariadne auf Nax. For rent below average foreign guests, additionally inhabited?
Among the main actors, only the Icelandic singer Arnheiður Eirksdttir delivered an acceptable performance in the role of the composer. They could at least hear some natural sounds, but dated. In Prague and Slun she sang, among others, Octavina in Strauss’ “The Cavalier” and then Rosina in Rossini’s “Lazebenko of Seville”.
It is interesting that her biography identifies her as a mezzo-soprano. Then why is my deep tone weak and dull and why is the poet’s entire voice so shrill and pale? Shouldn’t her knees be strong for lyric soprano and another repertoire in which she could really develop her vocal potential (for once)? For soft and fair skin, plus or minus somewhere in the middle, it’s not a mezzo-soprano
Actually, everything sounded the same on stage – coloratura, dramatic soprano, mezzo-soprano, and it hurt, just like the sounds of the unsweetened voice in the other roles. Dagmar Peckov has been playing the role for some time, here she played the speaking role of the court master. At least she was invisible.
A bit of history
In the archives of the National Theater it can be found that Ariadne was played (originally) in 1940 under the direction of Zdeko Chalabala, sung by Jaroslav Gleich (Bakchus), Marta Krsov (Ariadna) and Maria Tauberov (Zerbinetta). How it must have sounded! How exciting, for example, must have been the contrast between the classically dignified (Krsov) and the vulgar (Tauberov) speech! Mr. Tauberov, if the hunter only knew them from the notes, certainly did not speak with a small voice like Mr. Ziyi Dai. And Mr. Krsov, and the mezzo-soprano (a real one!), thanks to their technique, Ariadne’s drama really challenged them with cultivated tones.
Everyone remembers this performance, but there are also memories of the Vdesk State Opera in 1979 in the then Smetanov Theater, first with Ariadne na Naxo, with Edita Gruberová (Zerbinetta), but also with other leading singers of that time. It wasn’t recorded, but individual performers can be found everywhere. are they all two? The artistic criteria of the production are at the forefront of the story and do not have to be adapted to each production in detail. And that’s why Ariadne suffers in Nrodni.
#REVIEW #Poor #Ariadne #Nrodnm #television #remained