Bruno Ravella has become director of choice for Strauss at Garsington Opera, it would seem, where his new staging of Ariadne auf Naxos follows his benchmark Intermezzo of 2015 and his elegant Rosenkavalier two years ago. All three have revealed a fine understanding of the complexities of Strauss’s music and dramaturgy. His Ariadne, however, is more radical than its predecessors, a considered, if at times drastic rethink of an ambivalent even problematic work.
Ravella strips the opera of its familiar associations with the baroque, either in the original 18th-century setting or the ornate profusion that most directors bring to it. In their place is something altogether more stark and austere. Designer Giles Cadle’s simple set of staircases and platforms initially frame the backstage doors and rooms for the Prologue, but are later transformed by Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting into a disquieting, Escher-type labyrinth – Naxos as an island of the mind where Natalya Romaniw’s Ariadne is effectively imprisoned by her own loneliness. Costumes, meanwhile, suggest the 1950s, with Romaniw in a plain pink dress and her attendants in green, while Polly Leech’s Composer and Young Woo Kim’s Bacchus both wear suits.
