Strauss collides with Fellini in Rodula Gaitanou’s production of Ariadne auf Naxos, first seen in Gothenburg in 2018, now taken into Opera North’s repertory. Gaitanou relocates the work from 18th-century Vienna to Rome’s Cinecittà studios in the 1950s, and the unseen parvenu who demands an entertainment in which an opera company and a commedia dell’arte troupe perform simultaneously has now become an autocratic film producer bent on juxtaposing serious drama with farce. The additional layer of reference doesn’t add significantly to the work, though there are many pleasures as well as occasional lapses along the way.
The opera/film shoot is performed in the original German, though the Prologue comes in a clever multilingual version by Christopher Cowell, appropriate to the international lineup of artists the producer assembles. Hanna Hipp’s Composer deals with the surrounding mayhem in English but reverts to German in moments of reflection, while the self-dramatising Prima Donna/Ariadne (Elizabeth Lewellyn) and Tenor/Bacchus (Ric Furman) hurl insults at each other in Italian. Gaitanou, meanwhile, does wonderful things with the growing attraction between Hipp and Jennifer France’s glamorous Zerbinetta, enacted with telling sincerity, the pair of them thrown off balance by their feelings for each other.
