The Quatuor Ébène Between Salzburg and Washington

The Quatuor Ébène impressed audiences around the world, not the least since their winning the ARD Competition in 2004. In Washington Pierre Colombet (first violin), Gabriel Le Magadure (second violin), Mathieu Herzog (viola), and Raphaël Merlin (cello) last played in 2006 where they offered repertoire staples (Bartók, Haydn, Ravel) at the Corcoranand examples of their other passion – Jazz – at the Library of Congress. On March 6^th, they will embark on their first big North American tour, starting in Boston, criss-crossing the country by hitting Oklahoma, Gainsville, Portland, Seattle, New York’s Carnegie Hall, and – fortunately – Washington DC at the Library of Congress on March 13^th. Even for a town spoiled with great chamber music, this recital of Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel should be circled in all music enthusiasts’ calendars.

Meanwhile, on August 18^th this year, they gave their Salzburg Festival debut at the gorgeous Large Concert Hall of the Mozarteum. Their last concert before a months worth of vacation, it was at first a nervous, then free-wheeling, and on the whole triumphant debut.

J.Haydn, 3 Quartets, Quatuor Ébène Mirare B.Bartók, Quartets 1 - 3, Quatuor Ébène Mirare A.Webern, A.Berg, A.Schoenberg, Langsamer Satz, Lyric Suite, SQ4t.#4, Quatuor Psophos Zig Zag

That they played a program of those works they are the most familiar with did not that they were playing it safe. The opening Debussy showed the ambient acoustic of the hall, blending the strings’ sound nicely – and, though on first impression only – perhaps even a little too much. In the French quartet’s hands the 1893 op.10 in g-minor was a modern, torn affair, played with the greatest urgency and vehemence. The pizzicato-happyAssez vif et bein rythmé cannot fail to thrill in any case, but the playful and nuance-rich way of the Ébène showed their great familiarity and equally great joy of performing the Debussy. The gentleness and rich glow of the Andantino was milked for dreamy loveliness and the Très modéréfinale equal parts delirium and exuberance, but somehow the inner tension had slacked and the music lost a bit of its compelling cohesion.

The searching first movement Lento of Bartók’s First String Quartet op.7 (1908, Szöllözy 40) doesn’t make it particularly easy to find one’s way into, but the ardor especially of the lower strings had the interested, if lamentably sparse audience engaged from beginning to end – when the quartet has reached the riveting Allegro vivace by way of (Allegro) Introduzione. From the very audibly cosseted Beethoven reminiscences right through the middle movement to the finale where Bartók’s freewheeling sprit and the “Peacock” folk-tune fly about and around our ears: This was an assault on all the senses in the most invigorating, stimulating way. If a quartet can’t let it rip during Bartók, then when?

During intermission a few people fled from Anton Webern’s name staring at them from the program. This might have been more understandable – though still lamentable – had the Quatuor Ébène programmed his String Quartet op.28 or Six Bagatelles op.9 which are admittedly ‘difficult’ listening. But on the menu was Webern’s Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement for String Quartet). The filigreed, high-romantic chromaticism is one of the most searing pieces of music ‘per square inch’ there is. It’s Tristan & Isolde condensed into 9 minutes. Magnificent the Ébène’s lush reading: a better case for Webern could scarcely have been made. Easily the highlight of this excellent recital, this was one of those examples where words fail and only music can continue to speak. The atmosphere of a whole hall collectively holding its breath during the most exquisite pianissimopassages alone elevated the recital to one of those rarest of moments that can instill, further, or restore one’s faith in music. Quiet ecstasy!

Back to earth for Ravel: a more gritty type of fun and joy – and the official twin of the Debussy Quartet. Not the elation of Webern or the exhaustive bursts of energy of the Bartók, but just the thing to deliver a kick and quicken one’s step on the way from the Mozarteum out into the awaiting Salzburg night. The first two movements were a display of the most nimble delicacy and wit, putting smiles on faces all around. The third movement was surprisingly dark and hovering, though lacking a little tension again. No matter: the Vif et agité finale ripped forth from their instruments like a bat out of hell. Instrument abuse in the service of music. This was music as entertainment – which is precisely what music is and what it should be. Three unconventional encores – Chick Corea’s “Spain”, Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue”, and a Piazzola-esque rendition of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack underlined the aspect of brilliant entertainment.

Anton Webern, Langsamer Satz (excerpt), Quatuor Psophos, Zig Zag Territoires

Early October the Quatuor Ébène will issue their first recording on their new label, Virgin, with Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel.

Out of Frame: Elegy

Philip Roth: The Breast The Professor of Desire The Dying Animal

Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s new film, Elegy, is an adaptation of a book by Philip Roth, that famous libido who also had a second career as a novelist. Roth’s characters, usually bookish academic types, have molested, abused, and otherwise fucked their way through some of the most memorable pages in American literature. The character David Kepesh made his appearance in a Kafkaesque novella in which he was transformed into a massive tit -- literally, the part of the female anatomy (The Breast, 1971). Just as Gregor Samsa had to learn how to get along as a giant beetle, Kepesh learned to cope with existence as a mammary. A few years later, Prof. Kepesh returned in The Professor of Desire, which went back to Kepesh's childhood and the first installments of what would become a Don Juan’s catalogue of conquests. In the third volume, The Dying Animal, from 2001, Roth has his character confront the inevitable end of his lustful quest -- not that he loses his sex drive, but that it becomes obsessively bound up with one woman.

David Kepesh, played in Elegy by veteran actor Ben Kingsley, is a celebrity intellectual, a professor of literature, an author, a theater reviewer for The New Yorker. In a charming introductory scene, we see him speaking about his new book on the Charlie Rose show. The book lays out Kepesh's vision of sex in American life, torn between the poles of Puritan society and that other, lesser-known colonial outpost, Merry Mount (an episode of American history recounted in Howard Hanson’s opera of that name). Things have changed for Kepesh since the 60s and 70s, when Roth was first writing about him, and Coixet accompanies the character’s narration of how he seduces his female students by focusing in on a sign posted in the hall by his classroom, with the campus’s sexual harassment hotline number (a detail, like so many in the film, taken more or less directly from Roth's book). Kepesh is now careful to wait to approach his quarry until after he turns in his grades, by giving a cocktail party for his class.

Coixet’s screenplay, by Nicholas Meyer (who also adapted Roth's novel The Human Stain), captures the intensely introspective tone of Roth’s prose, with a minimum of clumsy interior monologue, mostly in the charming interaction of Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) with his best friend George, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (Dennis Hopper). Both men married in their youth and both have been serial seducers of younger women, but George has stayed with his wife. Kepesh’s latest conquest is Consuela Castillo (Penélope Cruz), a daughter of conservative Cuban immigrants, and from their first encounter, Kepesh recognizes that she is different – he confesses himself enchanted by her, even without sex.

The thing about Roth's writing that either infuriates or amazes, depending on the reader, is its unrelentingly unapologetic maleness. Perhaps inevitably, the female directorial perspective has softened that tone, the edge in Kepesh's libido that leads him to want to control and abuse Consuela, and Roth's tendency toward the outré. At one point in the novel, Kepesh licks Consuela's menstrual blood off her body while in the shower, something that is obliquely referred to in the movie through a plot detail about Consuela's tampon. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Roth wanted his novel's quasi-abusive fellatio scene to make it into the film in a graphic way, something that Coixet declined to do.

Other Reviews: Washington Post | Los Angeles Times | TIME | New York Times Salon | The New Yorker | Rotten Tomatoes

What Coixet has made is something other than a Philip Roth novel, and in the last half-hour or so, the movie becomes too weepy and sentimental for my taste as Coixet veers away from the qualities that make Roth's book so Rothian. Not to ruin either book or movie with spoilers, but the book's ending is much more complicated than the movie's, which turns the story from a dark uncertainty to a predictable Hollywood finality. That being said, the performances are all good, beginning with Kingsley, who said in New York Magazine that he played the role very close to himself. Cruz ends up at her most radiant and sexy, after an opening look that is, intentionally, a little fussy. Even without that fellatio scene, what she has done in this movie in terms of vulnerability was courageous.

Dennis Hopper manages, for once, not to come across as too weird and is actually charming and funny. Patricia Clarkson, as the older woman who visits Kepesh regularly for no-string-attached sex, is an equally repugnant female counterpart to Kingsley. The most unexpected performance comes from Peter Sarsgaard as Kepesh's estranged son, Kenny, a character much more fully developed in the novel. Nervous, restless, judgmental, he fidgets his way through his own problems, hoping only not to become like his father. It is precisely that, of course, he is doomed to become, as he confesses that he, too, has been cheating on his wife. Coixet has an eye for form and color, arranging scenes that are gorgeously shot by Jean-Claude Larrieu, although handheld shots, a little jiggly, are overused.

Elegy opens in Washington today, August 22, at the E Street Cinema.


Excerpt from Elegy, directed by Isabel Coixet

Christ, Who Is My Life

Bach, Cantatas BWV 27, 84, 95, 161, Collegium Vocale Gent, P. Herreweghe (released April 8, 2008) Harmonia Mundi HMC 901969 Online scores: Bach Cantatas

Herreweghe: BWV 2, 20, 176 BWV 8, 125, 138 BWV 12, 38, 75 BWV 35, 54, 170 BWV 63, 91, 121, 133 BWV 207, 214

Today's CD collector has quite a choice when it comes to excellent recordings of Bach's cantatas: several complete cycles are in progress, including Masaaka Suzuki's with Bach Collegium Japan and John Eliot Gardiner's on Soli Deo Gloria, and there are older sets by Nikolaus Harnoncourt ("Das Kantatenwerk"), Helmuth Rilling (with the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart), and Ton Koopman (with Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra), as well as many fine non-cycles here and there. An example of the latter that will hopefully end up as one of the former is the series of Bach cantata discs under the direction of Philippe Herreweghe, with Collegium Vocale Gent. One particular volume, including one of Bach's best cantatas (Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen), has come in for special praise here before.

Herreweghe has organized many of his cantata releases around a liturgical theme, and for this disc he brings together three of Bach's cantatas for the 16th Sunday after Trinity. The Gospel reading for that feast, which usually falls somewhere in September, was the story of Jesus raising the son of widow of Nain from the dead. Told in Luke 7:11-17, it is one of three resurrections that Jesus performed in the Gospels: he comes across a funeral procession near the gate of the city of Nain, feels compassion for the bereft mother, and orders the dead son to rise from his bier. Bach's cantatas do not meditate on the joy of the mother who has incredibly regained her son from death; rather, their texts focus on the son and the door to joy that death represents for the believer. The attempt seems to be to put the listener in the role of the corpse lying on the bier, as in BWV 95, "Mein Sterbelied ist schon gemacht; / Ach, dürft ich's heute singen!" (My funeral hymn is already prepared; Ah, that I might sing it today!).

As he usually does, Herreweghe uses singers from his elite choir for the solos, except for bass Thomas Bauer who steps in for Peter Kooy (not without some disappointment). Hans Jörg Mammel is an impressively light and sweet high tenor in the mold of Mark Padmore, but not quite up to the demands of "Ach, schlage doch bald" in BWV 95 (Christus, der ist mein Leben, from the first Leipzig cycle in 1723). Matthew White has an elegant countertenor voice on the alto solos, like "Willkommen! will ich sagen," with its equally sparkling bassoon obligato by Philippe Miqueu. As is often the case in Bach's cantatas, the choral movements are among the most satisfying, like the chorale with interpolated solo lines that opens BWV 27 (Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende?, from the third Leipzig cycle in 1726).

The instrumental playing is no less pleasing, with the two recorders and organ's mellow chiff making the hour of death seem very sweet indeed, in the opening aria of BWV 161 (Komm, du süße Todesstunde, composed in 1716, during Bach's tenure at Weimar). To round out the set of four, Herreweghe adds BWV 84, a solo soprano cantata intended for Septuagesima Sunday (from the third Leipzig cycle in 1726). Although the Gospel reading for that Sunday was different, the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the theme of Ich bin vergnügt mit meinem Glücke is contained in its first line, "I am content with my good fortune." Herreweghe's lead soprano, Dorothee Mields, has an unaffected purity that sits beautifully with the resignation of the libretto.

62'38"

Ionarts at Large: Rusalka Premiere at the Salzburg Festival

Different, wonderful, and utterly conventional – that might best define Jossi Wieler & Sergio Morabito’s Salzburg Rusalka: delightful touches shot through with some odd moments and an orchestra in Franz Welser-Möst’s Clevelanders that bathed the singers in appropriately angular, only occasionally sumptuous Dvořák. The orchestra, the highlight of the premiere on the 17^th, displayed a wonderfully civilized sound, perfectly attuned to the needs of Prince Piotr Beczala and Rusalka Camilla Nylund.

Barbara Ehnes’ set in the House for Mozart (formerly known as the Small Festival House) was a strange mix of hunting lodge meets sauna, bordello with vinyl couches, and a 1970 home’s tacky living room fit for a pimp. Unfortunately it didn’t always support the many fine individual moments of the direction so much as it let them down. A nice touch, though, to have the revolving stage ‘rock’ back and forth (by gently sliding it from left to right) during scenes under or near water – or to use the prompter’s hole as an abyss whence the watery creatures came and whither they went.

Camilla Nylund as Rusalka, Salzburger Festspiele 2008 Photo © A.T. Schaefer

There were humorous moments with a stuffed animal cat that first the youthful Rusalka played with, only for it to return as an oversized cat-agent of the seedy Water-witch Ježibaba (Birgit Remmert) who blow-dries Rusalka’s fishtail to become legs in preparation for the latter’s landfall. The cat returned once more, less prominently, in Act III as a purring kitten on Ježibaba’s (vinyl) couch: this time a real cat (!) and obviously one with nerves like steel to stay put amid full throttled singing all around.

Neat the idea for Rusalka to have a shoe closet before she even has feet – giving away her dreams of a land-bound future but also serving as means of enticement for Ježibaba. When she does become human, in search of love and a soul, she wears five-inch heels that only underscore her awkward gait, unfit to move properly in human social settings and stiff in manner and appearance. But somehow it all didn’t connect upon first viewing: Surely the underlying story of various suppressed, unexplored, or impossible sexual identities, hopes, and desires could have been conveyed with more immediacy or a greater, clearer dramatic line.

Camilla Nylund and Piotr Beczala in Rusalka, Salzburger Festspiele 2008 Photo © A.T. Schaefer

The opening, with the Water Goblin Vodník ascending from beneath the stage and the three wood sprites flirting and dancing in suggestive fashion, exuded a strong hint of Das Rheingold á la Patrice Chéreau. The second act’s Tchaikovsky moments and ever recurring (and promptly aborted) catchy – very catchy – dance rhythms were all expertly executed by Welser-Möst and his crew. I don’t know where the harmonium in the Act III chorus came from (I don’t remember having noticed that before), but it had a similar effect as Smetana’s tableaux vivant “Rybář” (The Fisherman) which in turn looks back to Das Rheingold.

Piotr Beczala sang his heart out and was the only major character who had no problems with the Czech libretto. His role might be a little smaller than Rusalka’s (who has two of the more thankful arias in 20^th century opera) but he outsang even the excellent Camilla Nylund - who in turn topped her Prince, would-be lover, and betrayer in the dramatic presentation. The two Americans mezzos Emily Magee (a clamorous, appealing foreign duchess) and Washington regular bass Alan Held (a booming Water Goblin) completed the well above average vocal contributions: Held’s voice rang throughout the excellent acoustic of the House for Mozart, even when he sang toward the back of the stage, making irrelevant to non-native Czech ears that his pronunciation reminded as much of Hungarian as of a Slavic language.

The Salzburg Festival crowd, perhaps because the production poked fun at them in the excellent humiliation scene at Rusalka’s wedding festivities, or perhaps because it wouldn’t be a proper Salzburg premiere without it, loudly booed the production, thereby provoking nearly as vocal bravo-salvos. This fine though not entirely satisfactory production probably deserved neither.

Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito and Franz Welser-Möst Photo © Luigi Caputo

Recommended Recording: Dvořák, Rusalka, Mackerras / Czech Philharmonic / Fleming, Heppner, Hawlata, Urbanová , Zajick

New Dettingen Te Deum

Handel, Dettingen Te Deum, Organ Concerto No. 14, Zadok the Priest, N. Davies, R. Marlow, Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, Academy of Ancient Music, S. Layton (released June 10, 2008) Hyperion CDA67678 Online score: HWV 283

Handel's D major setting of the Te Deum, HWV 283, is known by the nickname Dettingen because Handel began the work in expectation of having it performed at a public ceremony of thanksgiving for the victory of George II at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. It is not exactly an over-recorded piece of music, but Trevor Pinnock and Simon Preston put together a well-remembered version of the Dettingen Te Deum on a 1984 recording (seems to be cheaper here) with the Choir of Westminster Abbey and the English Concert. While that disc paired the work with the shorter Dettingen Anthem, conductor Stephen Layton combines it instead with one of the Handel organ concertos and the coronation anthem Zadok the Priest.

It was Handel's last encounter with one of the best, most important liturgical texts in Christian history, in the Book of Common Prayer's English version. As with so many other church texts, the words are much more durable and grand than any later, so-called modern version: "To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry" could hardly be a more poetic rendering of Tibi Cherubim et Seraphim incessabili voce proclamant, or "the goodly fellowship of the prophets praise thee" of Te prophetarum laudabilis numerus. The handling of the music is superlative, with a beautifully blended performance of the five-part choruses by the 30-some voices of the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, in whose chapel the sound was captured.

The choir's sound is especially distinguished by its rarefied soprano section (women instead of the boys on the Pinnock disc), with strong solo work from one of the choir's altos, countertenor Christopher Lowrey. Members of the Academy of Ancient Music provide gentle support in many passages, as well as brilliant bombast of trumpets and timpani in the more regal parts. Richard Marlow plays well on the A major organ concerto, on a portative organ modeled on a German instrument, if short of the flair associated with Handel's name. The performance of the famous coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest, is tight and a little too careful but still thrilling to hear. All in all, warmly recommended.

60'33"

Ionarts at Large: Wall of Horns at the Munich Opera Festival 2008

If the Eroica Symphony is that much greater a work for including horns, then therefore the horn as such must be that great an instrument. Imagine such greatness times eight – and you arrive necessarily, logically, at the genus of the horn octet. A compelling idea, clearly – as it should be a slice of musical heaven, on par with the Ode to Joy or the Halleluiah, by virtue of configuration alone.

If somehow the arithmetic doesn’t solve quite that neatly it must be because musical reality has a different mind. And it could be found out at the 2nd Chamber Concert in honor of the re-opening of the Munich Cuvilli­és Theater, that incomparable rococo jewel-box that the diminutive jester-cum-architect François de Cuvilli­és built for Elector of Bavaria, Max III. Joseph. Astonishingly, that concert – featuring only horns – was not nearly as silly as it might seem form the above premise. (A premise which I have admittedly distorted and re-fashioned to my liking from the somewhat more humble program notes.)

In fact, if you wanted to make an all-Horn concert a genuinely interesting affair, the first half gave the blueprint on how to do it. Eight horns began with a Michael Praetorius Baroque Suite which had the qualities of tender organ pipes played by an eight-fingered instrumentalist above. Three natural horns provided a very different look in Three Trios of F.Clapisson’s. What would have been a manageable task on modern French horns was fiendishly difficult on these instruments – a fact that demanded its tribute from the players without diminishing the accomplishment of the musicians of the Bavarian State Orchestra involved.

Three pieces by Gioachino Rossini were then played on four huge, valve-less hunting horns and the players appropriately donned hunting coats. Tailored to these instruments, it’s fairly simple music, of course... and the result akin to watching bicyclists climbing a steep mountain pass in the age of SUVs or Olympian sprinters run the 100-meter dash with their shoes tied together.

Regular horns were in use for Eugéne Bozza’s “Suite Pour Quatre Cors”. The six-partite work could be shorter, but the opening Prélude is kind on the ears. Spectacularly unfashionable, of course, as someone must have forgotten to tell Mr. Bozza that writing music of conventional beauty and harmony – even for friends – is very much a breach of convention and not at all the ­bon ton as it were among composers of the 20^th century. Calliope was not audibly present when this work was begotten, but it is gratifying Gebrauchsmusik capping off a varied first half that was as much a feast for the eyes as for the ears.

Idomoneo ballet music sequences played with ten (10!) horns means that much Mozart and all the Mozartean lightness is lost. Imagine the “Dance of the Shadows” from La Bayadere as re-interpreted by two dozen small circus elephants. You admire the dexterity, but the grace of the original somewhat suffers along the way.

You may not think of Richard Strauss as a patently light composer – but he was an incredibly adept one and the colors and existent lightness (which is very light, when it does show up) suffers almost as much from this sort of transcription (both by Franz Kanefzky) as did the Mozart. Everything is gray and unlovely, even if occasional turns of phrases of the thus adapted Rosenkavalier-mélange rang true in this French horn monoculture. Had those perfectly lovely moments been sought out with greater discrimination, the whole affair would probably have been thoroughly pleasing.

As it was, the mere accomplishment of playing the music reasonably faultless did not suffice for whole-hearted admiration for either of these two pieces. Curious, though probably not surprising, that the two more promising works made for the much less inspired half.

À mon chevet: The Breast

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

The Shakespeare edition I used in college -- Neilson and Hill, The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, bound in blue linen, worn at the spine by my earnest undergraduate grip, and heavily underlined by me then for wisdom -- is on the table beside the hammock. It is one of several books I have asked Claire to bring from my apartment. I remember exactly what it looks like, which is why I wanted it here. In the evenings, during the second half hour of her visit, Claire looks up for me in the footnotes words whose usage I long ago learned and forgot; or she will slowly read aloud some passage that I missed that morning when my mind departed Elsinore Castle for Lenox Hill Hospital. It seems to me important to get these passages clear in my head -- my brain -- before I go off to sleep. Otherwise it might begin to seem that I listen to Hamlet for the same reason that my father answers the phone at my Uncle Larry's catering establishment -- to kill time.

[Laurence] Olivier is a great man, you know. I have fallen in love with him a little, like a schoolgirl with a movie star. I've never before given myself over to a genius so completely, not even while reading. As a student, as a professor, I experienced literature as something unavoidably tainted by my self-consciousness and all the responsibilities of serious discourse; either I was learning or I was teaching. But responsibilities are behind me now; at last I can just listen.

-- Philip Roth, The Breast (1972), pp. 79-80

This little book has a fertile premise and it rolls along on its narrator's alluring voice, but at the end it feels a little like Roth either lost interest in the story or saw that it was nearing the end of its potential. So the tale of David Kepesh the breast ends suddenly, but Roth returned to the character a few years later, going back to the beginning of Kepesh's life.

Ariadne Marooned at Wolf Trap

(L to R) Anne-Carolyn Bird (Naiad), Marjorie Owens (Ariadne), Leena Chopra (Echo), and Jamie Van Eyck (Dryad) in Ariadne auf Naxos, Wolf Trap Opera, 2008 (photo by Kim Pensinger Witman)

After taking summer opera lovers to the island of Alcina last month, Wolf Trap Opera Company went to another island, in the Aegean Sea, where Ariadne found herself abandoned by Theseus. Well, sort of. To cap off a season in which the company has done everything just about as well as it could -- choice of operas, casting, staging, execution -- Wolf Trap turned to Richard Strauss's postmodern opera about an opera that has gone terribly, terribly wrong. Ariadne auf Naxos is the strangest work of the Strauss-von Hoffmannsthal partnership, conceived as an occasional work (part of an adaptation of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) and then revised to stand on its own. Some are not convinced of its merits, but it does struggle with the major question facing 20th-century music -- is pleasing the audience more important than staying true to your compositional vision?

Strauss turned his biting wit on himself, helping his librettist make a caricature out of the character of Der Komponist, the composer who is trying to complete an opera commission for a wealthy's patron's private entertainment. The two stars of the opera, a soprano and a tenor, compete in vanity for the composer's attention. The noble patron, more capricious than any singer, now wants the opera to be combined with the antics of a troupe of comic players, led by the flirty actress Zerbinetta. The staging by Thaddeus Strassberger exaggerated rather than merely set the differences between popular and serious, increasing the membership of Zerbinetta's band with the singers who appear in the second act as Najade, Dryade, and Echo (which included rehearsing a striptease number). Numerous gags, especially involving toilet paper and the Tenor in the bathroom, were interpolated, halting the action completely more than once.

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, High Notes Abound in 'Ariadne' (Washington Post, August 18) T. L. Ponick, 'Ariadne' a joyful jumble (Washington Times, August 18) Tim Smith, Strauss' comedic 'Ariadne' a delight (Baltimore Sun, August 19)

Playing to the burlesque in the story is fine, but to do so without the proper balance of respect for the serious side of Strauss's score misses the point. For all of the joking at his own expense, Strauss gives the most sublime music to Der Komponist in the first act and to Ariadne in the second. A director who distracts from it with stage business not even in the libretto should have his head examined. The lesson learned is not only that the composer sees his own high seriousness mocked but that levity and coquettishness may not be enough to sustain Zerbinetta. There was too much of the former in this production and not enough of the latter. In spite of that weakness, the sets designed by Erhard Rom were evocative, if slightly cramped, showing a dingy backstage area (becoming the stage space in the second act), as well as two adjoining dressing rooms.

Fortunately, the music and the generally fine singing made the point much more clearly than the staging missed it. Standing out from the crowd were the composer of Elizabeth DeShong, who showed that her Strauss was formidable, if perhaps not yet the equal of her Handelian exploits in Alcina. The notes and the power were all there, but a metallic shallowness crept in occasionally, especially at the beginning. As the voice grows and matures, it will likely blossom into a lustrous Komponist. We were deprived of really hearing Marjorie Owens in Un Giorno di Regno, when she was indisposed, but as the Soprano and Ariadne, she soared from sonorous depths to a searing top, a large, potent, Straussian voice.

Diego Torre (Bacchus) in Ariadne auf Naxos, Wolf Trap Opera, 2008 (photo by Carol Pratt)

Married to a soprano, Strauss preferred female voices, setting many of his most beloved ensembles for all (or mostly) treble voices. He seems particularly to have hated tenors, casting them either in ridiculous character roles or making heroic vocal demands that are too daunting for almost all potential singers. Tenor Diego Torre has not made that much of an impression in the season up to this point, but it was clear that he was brought to Wolf Trap for this opera. As the Tenor and Bacchus, Torre sang with clarion fierceness, with the sort of dramatic weight that could make for great Strauss and Wagner eventually. The downside of opera's current obsession with youth and beauty is that sometimes less satisfying voices are heard instead of the strongest ones. One point that the Wolf Trap company has made with this season is that sometimes excellent voices balance out favorably against plus-sized casting.

Leena Chopra (Echo, supposedly) in Jerry Springer: The Opera Ariadne auf Naxos, Wolf Trap Opera, 2008 (photo by Kim Pensinger Witman)

The least convincing of the lead roles was Erin Morley's Zerbinetta, which had sparkle, flightiness, and sexy allure but lacked some power to carry against the orchestra at times. The trio of Najade, Dryade, and Echo was centered on the tannic weight of Jamie Van Eyck, with flavors of golden honey (Anne-Carolyn Bird) and airy fizz (Leena Chopra) to color their mellifluous trio ("Töne, töne, süsse Stimme"). All three were cast with physical considerations in mind, as the aforementioned strip number required them to wear (or not to wear) very revealing costumes. It made a hash of the libretto, but no one is likely to mind Leena Chopra's slutty Valkyrie too much at all. Other performances are noteworthy mostly for how far over the top the director pushed them: Rodell Rosel's flaming Tanzmeister, the Lakai of Thomas Florio as black-clad techie, and the ridiculous Harlekin of Joshua Jeremiah.

Conductor Timothy Long kept his pick-up band, spread out from the pit to the left side of the house (where else to put those two harps?), together for the most part. The wind and brass playing was generally excellent, although the strings, in fairly small numbers, could have sounded more unified in tone quality and intonation. The costumes (designed by Mattie Ullrich) helped reinforce the director's vision of the opera's conclusion, misguided but with potential, in which Ariadne, the opera within the opera, ends and we see the stars taking their bows. The illusion is stripped away as the players appear in the "wings" out of costume, and Zerbinetta and the Composer meet in her dressing room. Lights out.

Only one more performance of Ariadne auf Naxos remains, on Tuesday night (August 19, 8 pm). The whole run reportedly sold out some time ago, so you will have to be inventive to find a ticket at this point.