Last year’s Strauss anniversary was marked on disc with a plethora of reissues but comparatively little new work, so this version of his opera about opera, though released late, is more than welcome. Taped live at the Frankfurt Opera in 2013, it’s an insightful, if uneven affair. The recording’s provenance is very apparent in moments of wayward voice/orchestra balance, stage clatter and audience intrusion. Beauty is at times sacrificed to emotional truth, and both qualities should ideally be consistently present if the piece is to have its full impact.
It’s superbly conducted, however, by Sebastian Weigle, whose understanding of the dramatic bifurcation between backstage vicissitudes and onstage magic is wonderfully acute. The Prologue has an edge that takes us into deeper, darker territory than the more usual mix of Romanticism and farce. Weigle uses sensible speeds in the big conversational exchanges, so that the words and issues have meaning, and it doesn’t sound like people gabbling at each other the whole time. When we reach the opera within the opera, Strauss’s impudent gestures in the directions of Mozart, Wagner, bel canto and ragtime all add up into something genuinely spellbinding, and just for once we get a real sense of erotic mystery in the big closing duet for Bacchus and Ariadne.
The singing is good and glamorous here, too, although, on this showing, Michael König (Bacchus) and Camilla Nylund (Ariadne) seem to be artists whose voices take time to settle in performance: earlier on, we find König woofing his top notes and Nylund sounding very steely indeed. Elsewhere, the men prove to be the downside, with Daniel Schmutzhard an unsmiling Harlequin and Franz Grundheber in curiously poor voice as the Music Master. The big plusses are Claudia Mahnke’s troubled Composer and Brenda Rae’s suggestive, astonishingly accurate Zerbinetta. It’s not as good as Rudolf Kempe’s benchmark EMI recording, but Weigle makes it an important alternative to more traditional readings, and Straussians will love the best of it.
