Ariadne reaches for the Stars

Bruno Ravella stages intriguing Strauss at Garsington Opera

The Prologue’s dressing rooms: above Natalia Romaniw (Prima donna/Ariadne), Young Woo Kim (Tenor/Bacchus), Claire Lees, Siân Griffiths, Harriet Eyley (nymphs), below Polly Leech (Composer) Jennifer France (Zerbinetta), Richard Pinkstone (Scaramuccio), Innocent Masuku (Brighella), Ossian Huskinson (Truffaldino), Marcus Farnsworth (Harlekin), William Dazeley (Music Master) John Graham-Hall (Dancing Master) Picture by Clive Barda

Memories of Bruno Ravella’s sumptuous production of Der Rosenkavalier for Garsington Opera in 2021 aroused expectations of a flamboyant, scenically elaborate Ariadne aux Naxos this summer at the same address. Instead, the theatrical experiment concocted by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal - an action-packed ‘Prologue’ in which backstage preparations are followed by an ‘Opera’ extolling fidelity in love - receives a comparatively plain but hardly less rewarding staging.

The designer Giles Cadle presents us with an austere opening scene, a two-level set showing the artists’ dressing rooms - upstairs for the posh opera singers, downstairs for the cast of  the ‘vulgar farce in the Italian buffo manner’, led by the coquettish soubrette Zerbinetta. Although this character has the opera’s only show-stopper - in most productions, anyway - Ravella throws the dramatic focus onto the grieving Ariadne, Hofmannsthal’s avatar for Ottonie von Degenfeld, a widowed countess of his acquaintance who became almost an obsession. As the Composer tells us in the Prologue, Ariadne is ‘the symbol of human loneliness’ - something hardly attractive to the down-to-earth, theatrically practical Strauss. Zerbinetta, a stratospherically singing flibbertigibbet, was more his thing.