Anyone who saw San Francisco Opera's last wonderful production of Ariadne auf Naxos will still remember, after a decade, not only Deborah Voigt and Thomas Moser at their best, but Laura Claycomb as Zerbinetta, stopping the show for an ovation night after night. Well, today, you can hear Claycomb in action again, as the Glyndebourne production is streamed, live and free.
Vladimir Jurowski conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Katharina Thoma is stage director; Soile Isokoski sings the title role, Kate Lindsey is the composer, Sergey Skorokhodov sings Bacchus, and Thomas Allen is the Music Master.
As The Independent review points out, the production is based on actual history:
Glyndebourne productions which put Glyndebourne itself on stage are nothing new, but for Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos director Katharina Thoma has harnessed a strand of history which has hitherto gone unremarked. In 1940, with opera off the menu, Glyndebourne became a reception centre for evacuee children.Thoma has slightly altered this function to make it a hospital for casualties of the Battle of Britain, and that is now the work’s framing device. In the original libretto two simultaneous competing ‘operas’ — one high tragedy, the other ribald comedy — become entangled in the second half: In Thoma’s reworking, the debate is about therapy rather than art.
But it begins with wonderful fizz as Thomas Allen, in Sprechgesang mode as the Music Master, rehearses the parting of his curtains to reveal frantic preparations in a simulacrum of Glyndebourne’s Organ Room. With Vladimir Jurowski and a slimmed-down contingent from the London Philharmonic spinning a delicate musical web, eye and ear can scarcely keep up with the pace as — choreographed by Lucy Burge — the dramatis personae arrive with competing claims on costumes, wigs, and space; every so often a potted palm makes its own exasperated comment by wilting dramatically.