Three Strauss Ladies Reviewed in HGO's "Ariadne"

"As The Prima Donna in the prologue and Ariadne in The Opera, Christine Goerke was confident and insistent, magnificent in every respect and clearly at the top of her game. Funny and dramatic, she seemed entirely natural in these roles, as if they had been written expressly for her. As well, her commanding voice was the only one that prevailed over a largely dominant orchestra. She has a powerful, fully resonant quality that would make her an ideal Wagnerian singer, and one can only imagine what her recent interpretation of Kundry in Parsifal at Turin’s Teatro Regio was like. I’d safely bet that it was incredible. Standing on her lonely rock and beckoning to what she believes is Hermes ready to escort her towards death, a spine-tingling moment, she was one of the most extraordinary artists on HGO’s stage this season."

"Just a month ago at Dallas Opera, Laura Claycomb gave an exacting, emotional performance as Gilda in Verdi’s popular Rigoletto. Her voice was rich and confident, clear in the high notes, her phrasing smooth and inventive. Thrilling to hear, she was also a very convincing actor, vulnerable and endearing as the hunchbacked jester’s beautiful daughter. This being the only other role I’ve seen her perform, however, it appears that she is much more attuned to Verdi’s flowing Italian than Strauss’ dense Austrian-flavored German. Her interpretation of Zerbinetta on Friday was largely unremarkable. It seemed she was protecting her voice in order to make it through the thing. Her high notes were raspy, sometimes thin. She struggled with the coloratura flourishes in the lengthy second-scene 'Opera' aria. She looked tired. This might have been unnoticeable if she had exuded more charisma. Zerbinetta is an 'all or nothing' role, and Claycomb stayed safely in the middle."

"In the prologue it is Zerbinetta, I believe, who refers to The Composer with contempt, saying, 'his endless top notes are irritating.' Funny when mentioned within the opera, unfortunately this was exactly the case with Susan Graham, who didn’t seem in good voice on Friday night. It was as if she couldn’t hear herself. She seemed even out of breath at times. Most of her top notes were distinctly sharp or flat, and vocally she wandered throughout the scene, giving us far too many sudden fortissimos. Strauss gave some of his most glorious phrases to this character, and I kept waiting for Graham to settle in and dazzle, but she didn’t. There is also the matter of her acting. Yes, The Composer has a stormy persona, but that doesn’t mean the part is one-dimensional. 'He' has to do more than stamp his foot time and again."

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From the ridiculous to the sublime

Tragedy meets comedy in Ariadne auf Naxos. Photos by Jeffrey Dunn.

I wasn't surprised that Boston Lyric Opera's production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos (which you still have a little time to catch) turned out to be one of the best operatic productions of the season. But I was surprised (a bit) as to the reason why.

I had expected this version (imported from the Welsh National Opera) to be remarkable in its witty physical comedy, after visits to rehearsals and chats with its director; instead - and probably most opera lovers will be glad to hear this - it was carried by some truly sublime singing. Boston Lyric is becoming known for assembling strong ensembles (rather than showcases for star turns), as evidenced by last year's Don Giovanni and this winter's Turn of the Screw. I'm happy to report that Ariadne auf Naxos belongs in that august company - indeed, it may boast the strongest cast of the three. The Strauss score features four notoriously difficult parts - the Composer (a pants role), Ariadne, Zerbinetta and Bacchus, and it's common for one or another of these (usually Bacchus) to prove second-class. But in Edyta Kulczak (Composer), Marjorie Owens (Ariadne), Rachele Gilmore (Zerbinetta) and Brandon Jovanovich (Bacchus), BLO put together a quartet of powerhouses. This production will be remembered most of all as a night of glorious singing.

Indeed, if this Ariadne foundered slightly early on, it did so because of its stagecraft. Which is ironic, since the opera is so much about theatrical conventions and inside jokes. The famous set-up is that "the richest man in Vienna" has commissioned two works - a tragic opera (titled, of course, "Ariadne auf Naxos") and a baggy-pants comedy (performed by a visiting commedia troupe) - for the entertainment after a huge banquet. The trouble is that both pieces have to be finished by nine o'clock, when the fireworks are set to start. But the banquet drags, time runs short, and it's suddenly announced that the tragedy and the comedy will have to be performed simultaneously. You can guess what happens next.

This opening "prologue" (as it's called) depends theatrically on a sense of growing chaos as time ticks remorselessly away - and the theatrical side of things is important, because much of this sequence is recitative rather than aria. But in this version, things seemed far too calm backstage, with hardly enough frenzied rushing hither and yon (often you see both the banquet and the fireworks roll by), and little sense of an impending artistic car-crash. Oddly enough, the bemused tone of the proceedings was just about right, and mezzo Edyta Kulczak gave an impassioned reading of the Composer's dismay at what was about to happen to his/her beloved score. But the success of this kind of thing is, as they say, all in the timing, and the actor-singers just weren't clicking like a well-oiled machine. There were a few timing problems in the pit as well, where Strauss's subtle, shifting sense of ensemble seemed to fray at times under the baton of conductor Erik Nielsen (horns, that means you).

But Nielsen pulled his crew together once the "opera within an opera" began, and most of Ariadne's music (and particularly her transfiguring finale) sounded superb. Everything else about the production grew more original and intriguing, too. The tattered set (beset, despite its artificiality, by actual winds) was surprisingly evocative, and the sophisticated lighting, by Tim Mitchell, seemed to literally glow from the stage itself. As Ariadne, Marjorie Owens deployed a formidably Wagnerian soprano, but gave it haunting touches of mournful delicacy as she wept in her abandonment on her famous rock, and she nailed her diva-esque tantrums once the harlequins showed up, too. Her girl-group back-up (of Naiad, Dryad and Echo) likewise hit just the right tenderly droll notes. The commedia troupe proved not quite as rowdy as I might have liked, but this was forgotten once Rachele Gilmore launched into Zerbinetta's famous aria, a killer piece of coloratura in which the soprano explains that to get over one guy, you simply have to find another (as she has herself, over and over). It would be hard to think of a better Zerbinetta than Gilmore, with her ripe, lightly sensuous presence, and her deliciously pure and agile voice, and this set-piece almost couldn't have been more delightful.


The finale of Ariadne auf Naxos.

The big surprise of the evening, however, came with the arrival of Bacchus; from his opening bars, tenor Brandon Jovanovich let it be known that he had not only the range to hit the pitches (which climb into the stratosphere) but also the power to blow out the back wall, too, and his final duets with Owens felt like the promised series of (at least vocal) fireworks (Owens just won the Grand Finals of the Met auditions, and Jovanovich is off to the Met as well, along with Chicago and San Francisco, so this may be your last chance to hear these performers here in Mudville). Not that the final moments of Ariadne turned into a series of vocal guantlets; quite the contrary, in fact. If anything, the mood of the piece deepened just as it should, and with a little help from a truly inspired lighting effect from Tim Mitchell (which pulled together both those impending fireworks and Bacchus's invocation of the eternal stars), the final moments achieved something like transcendence. Out of a lifetime of theatre- and opera-going, this Ariadne's closing tableau will stick with me as one of the great stage images I've ever seen. If you catch the last performance, I'm sure you'll agree.

Of Strauss, slapstick, and Ariadne auf Naxos

The commedia troupe strut their stuff in Ariadne auf Naxos. Production photos by Jeffrey Dunn.

Denni Sayers can't help herself; when someone is hitting somebody else with a big kielbasa, you can tell she just has to get involved.

"Brilliant, that's brilliant!" she giggles as she launches herself from the director's chair of a rehearsal of Boston Lyric Opera's Ariadne auf
Naxos (which opens tomorrow). "But can you hit him on this note - " she turns to the rehearsal pianist, who responds with a tinkling phrase - "rather than this one?"

She takes the sausage from the tenor and wham! smacks the bass with it on the downbeat.

"Oh and hit him right there," she says, pointing to a precise spot on his forehead. "Got it? Right there." Wham!

The bass sinks in a graceful spiral to the floor; the tenor waves his blunt instrument around like a tom-tom, and the room cracks up. And Sayers returns, still giggling, to the director's chair to dream up another prime slice of slapstick.

It's a typical moment from Ariadne auf Naxos, the opera that sounds like high tragedy but often plays more like a Warner Brothers cartoon. Intentionally. Because Richard Strauss's masterpiece is the tale of an opera company - specializing in a chunk of high tragedy (about the abandoned Ariadne weeping on her rock) - forced to share the stage with a commedia dell'arte troupe. That would be Harlequin, Truffaldino and their comrades (see above) - but you can also think of their many descendants, from Charlie Chaplin to Roger Rabbit, instead - who specialize not in high tragedy but low comedy, in fact precisely in setting a banana peel before the path of august convention.

And Sayers (above left) seems like the perfect person to pull these two opposed artistic worlds into conjunction. Although according to her, Ariadne isn't just about deflating the pretensions of high opera; instead, it's about a synthesis of high and low, a new way of looking at life and art from both perspectives at once.

Funny thing is, she seems like the perfect person to pull that off, too. With her sparkling eyes and punkette 'do, you might imagine her banging her head in a club on Lansdowne Street. But instead, she's expending her considerable choreographic skill on finding just the right physical comedy to match one of the subtlest, and quirkiest, scores of the twentieth century.

That's right. Choreographic skill. "To me, it was a natural progression from choreographer to director," she explains. "Since choreography is all about finding character through movement, I found myself asked to help more and more not just with set-pieces of dance, but with dramatic scenes as well. I seemed to be good at helping singers get from point A to point B both physically and emotionally." Gradually, Sayers was cast more and more often as assistant director, and today she generally commands her own productions, although in the case of Ariadne, she's shepherding the vision of Neil Armfeld, a long-time associate who helmed this acclaimed production at the Welsh National Opera.

She's working with an entirely new cast, however. "But that's what keeps it fresh," she laughs. "Working with new people, finding the production inside them - that makes it a discovery again."

But what about those moments when she jumps in and says, "No, hit him here"?

Sayers gets a wicked look in her eye. "I know, I can't help myself! But the whole point is to find it organically, from within the performers. You try to draw it out of them, not 'set it on' them. And this cast has been wonderful - the working atmosphere has just been wonderful. I've got [rising conducting star] Erik Nielsen to handle the orchestra, and the cast sounds ravishing." [Speaking from having heard one rehearsal, in which Rachele Gilmore sailed through Zerbinetta's famous aria, they oh, so do.]

"Still . . ." Sayers gets that gleam in her eye again. "Sometimes a singer needs a little help finding it. In releasing it, I should say. That's where I come in."

Indeed, sometimes it seems that singers have that same problem with dancing that white men have with jumping. "They're very different from dancers," Sayers agrees. "A dancer feels the beat in the body; a singer sees it on the page. I can count beats with a dancer; with a singer, I have to say 'You have to get there by the end of the eighth notes.' What's great is that they get that. Luckily, I learned to read music as a child, so I don't have to work from a tape of the score or anything, like so many movie and theatrical directors do who work in opera. The music itself is right there in my lap. Which is a very good thing," she says with a meaningful look. "Because this score is so tricky!"

Which it is; Strauss is always shifting his time signatures and musical texture. "And of course you can never forget that a singer is always singing. The thing is to get them to not obsess about that as they move," Sayers explains. "As a choreographer you generally work from the floor, from the legs. As an opera choreographer, you work from the breath. You always have to support that, you always have to be in sympathy with that. And you have to design your movement directionally, to keep the vocal focus where it should be. Even if you're choreographing an intimate little conversation, you have to enable your singers to project a huge volume of sound out to people sitting in the dark a hundred feet away."

And then, in the case of Ariadne auf Naxos, you also have to deal with the big sausage. "Actually it's not all slapstick!" Sayers insists. "The opera isn't about ridiculing high tragedy at all - although maybe it's a little bit about ridiculing self-seriousness. Ariadne has to learn to get on with her life, doesn't she? And she does (below), with a little help from Harlequin and Truffaldino - and Bacchus (who swoops in on a gangplank in this production). The opera is in fact a profound exploration of how you move on from a terrible loss. What I hope this production conveys is a vision of two worlds colliding and learning something from each other. The tragedians and the comedians, for all their differences, end up in mutual admiration. And that's a beautiful thing."


The transfiguring finale of Ariadne auf Naxos.