Ariadne auf Naxos, opera review: Ingenious staging mixes comedy with the mythic

​The conflicting claims of high and low art, not to mention the relation between art itself and real life, are salient themes of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Katharina Thoma’s production relocates the story to an English country house, not unlike Glyndebourne, around 1940. The lightweight Prologue ends with an air-raid, allowing for a deepening of the tone of the main opera that follows the interval.

The country house is requisitioned as a hospital for the war-wounded (hence the piano in the ward), Ariadne’s nymphs becoming nurses. It’s an ingenious solution to the inherent problem of staging this mixed-genre work, integrating the comic elements convincingly within a mythic context.

Angela Brower, who sings and acts the Composer eloquently, observes the opera he has helped create and touchingly learns a lesson about the reality of love through vicarious experience.

The award-winning Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen towers physically above the rest of the cast as Ariadne and has a voice to match. An ideal Ariadne might evince more vulnerability, but Davidsen clearly has huge potential in the heavier Strauss and Wagner repertoire.

A.J. Glueckert just about holds his own as Bacchus, while Erin Morley’s Zerbinetta delivers her stratospheric coloratura impressively (the straitjacket forced on her is in dubious taste, however).

Cornelius Meister gets glowing sonorities from the reduced LPO.

Until Jul 27, Glyndebourne; glyndebourne.com