Karita Mattila first sang the title role in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in a revival of Christof Loy’s 2002 Royal Opera production in June last year. She caused something of a stir, as she frequently does, and now she and the staging are back for a further three performances this season. Loy’s interpretation still strikes me as awkward. An opera about opera, Ariadne deals, in part, with how back-stage vicissitudes can be resolved and transcended in performance. Loy splits the work in two: the opera we watch the characters perform after the interval is not the one we’ve seen them prepare in the Prologue, which leads frustratingly to dramatic disunity.
But Mattila is unquestionably glorious. Her voice has darkened a bit since I last heard her, though that engulfing sound still hits you in the solar plexus. Her singing is wonderfully controlled yet abandoned in expression, trawling Strauss’s emotional extremes with an utterly compelling immediacy. Ever the theatrical animal, she turns the Prima Donna of the Prologue into a real monstre sacré, before taking us with her every step of the way on Ariadne’s journey from grief to sensual renewal in the second half.
This is, however, by no means a one-woman show. Robert Dean Smith sounds good as Bacchus. Jane Archibald is an exceptional Zerbinetta, her coloratura lethally accurate, expressive and suggestive: Loy, controversially perhaps, views her as vulnerable and in thrall to her muscle-pumping Harlequin, Nikolay Borchev. Ruxandra Donose makes an impulsive if effortful Composer, more extrovert than some.
Thomas Allen is the frazzled Music Master, while Karen Cargill, no less, is among Ariadne’s attendant Nymphs. Lothar Koenigs, making his Covent Garden debut, conducts with an immaculate sense of Straussian ebb and flow. Superb.
- Until 16 October. Box Office: 020-7304-4000.
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