Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✩
by Richard Strauss, directed by Neil Armfield
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
April 30-May 29, 2011
If you love virtuoso singing, you must see Ariadne auf Naxos. The 1916 work by Richard Strauss is an opera-within-an-opera, both humorous and profound. Sir Andrew Davis leads a superlative cast of singers and the COC Orchestra through a supremely refined account of the score.
The opening night audience may have gasped in disappointment that an ailing Adrianne Pieczonka would not be singing the title role that evening, but Pieczonka’s understudy, Amber Wagner, shortly into her first big aria, proved that she has a phenomenal voice and a flawless technique. By the end of the performance the audience showered her with acclaim. It was also announced that Jane Archibald, who was to sing Zerbinetta, one of the most difficult coloratura roles ever written, had a chest infection. Yet, Archibald gave an absolutely dazzling performance, tossing off trills, cadenzas and stratospheric high notes as if nothing could be easier. Add to that Richard Margison in fine heroic form as the god Bacchus and Alice Coote in a wonderfully sensitive performance as the naive Composer and the effect of the music was overpowering.
The opera’s unusual structure consists of a Prologue followed by a performance of the opera Ariadne auf Naxos, written by the young Composer. The richest man in Vienna has commissioned the opera but, to the dismay of the Composer, decrees that he wants Ariadne performed simultaneously with a farce staged by a commedia dell’arte troupe starring the flirtatious Zerbinetta. How can high and low art exist within the same piece? As we know from Shakespeare, when comedy and tragedy are juxtaposed, each heightens the effect of the other. Ariadne, abandoned by her lover Theseus, mistakes the god Bacchus for Death, so that their encounter transforms her longing for death unexpectedly into love. In contrast, Zerbinetta can’t count how many lovers she’s had and thrown over. The rich patron’s demand for mixing the divine and the profane thus actually reflects the reality of the world more accurately than either one alone could do. The main question for director Neil Armfield is why Vienna’s richest man cannot afford new scenery or attractive costumes for his production. Otherwise, this opera is so splendidly performed that the thrill of its music and the wisdom of its story will linger with you long after the final curtain.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-05-02.
Photo: Peter Barrett, Christopher Enns, Jane Archibald as Zerbinetta, Michael Uloth and John Easterlin. ©Michael Cooper.
2011-05-02
Ariadne auf Naxos