The Met season is off to a very promising start: First that fabulous Falstaff, and now a remarkable performance of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, whose mini-run wraps up on 11 October.
From Newsday, a review of Ariadne auf Naxos by vilaine fille alter ego Marion Lignana Rosenberg.
While James Levine's Ariadne, at its best, is a lifetime's musical highlight, his tempos of late have been exasperatingly pokey even in this urbane score. Thus, I was grateful to hear a new maestro's take on Ariadne. And Deborah Voigt: I adore her, but she's so gentle and ladylike. Violeta Urmana can't soar or linger at the high climaxes the way Voigt can, but her Ariadne has a down-and-dirty, princess-gone-bad wildness and devouring hunger that I find both thrilling and apt. Ariadne, after all, is the daughter of Pasiphaë, the sister of Phaedra, the half-sister of the Minotaur—in short, an eminently f*cked-up girl. She takes up with Dionysus, born of his father's loins when his mother was burnt to a crisp.
Any way you look at it, Ariadne and Bacchus are the baddest of bad-ass seed. They need danger… lunacy… lust!
Jon Villars was not in easy voice at the Ariadne prima, but—yowza!—did he look hot in his cape and thigh-high black boots. This was the first Ariadne I've seen where the stage (and not just the orchestra) really oozed sex at the opera's culmination.
And, yes, Diana Damrau was a super-fantastic Zerbinetta (chapeau to my idol, Manolo).
There are only four more performances of Ariadne. If you're within striking distance of New York, go.
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