Young Artists Give Ariadne the Old College Try, and Score

Ariadne auf Naxos (this weekend and next at Bellevue's Meydenbauer Center; tickets: $35) may not be a "real" opera--all that spoken Prologue, and the proto-pomo conceit of Tragedy and Comedy duking it out onstage--but that doesn't mean it's easy. Composer Richard Strauss liked his sopranos to earn it the hard way, with high notes.

So while I earlier made reference to Seattle Opera's Young Artists tackling Ariadne, I should say that Ariadne can take a hit. If you're a Young Artists fan--and if not, why not?--be prepared for the artistic risk involved. It's a show that pushes the young singers to their limits, so a few stumbles are par for the course.

Ariadne happens to be a favorite opera of mine; it's high- and low-minded, classical and modern, and funny and rapturous. Set in Vienna, the version we see had its premiere when Sigmund Freud was about 60, and the opera abounds in eros and thanatos, even as it critiques both. What distinguishes the opera is that it takes up a manifold view of reality--and maintains it, without expressing an overwhelming preference for any particular one.

From the Prologue, where Vienna's richest man rearranges his party to suit himself and the young Composer (the spot-on Vira Slywotsky, who succumbed too often to dramatic "opera hands") is outraged at the offense against Art, where the commedia troupe and the opera singers joust for position, where the opera tenor and soprano knife each other for stage time--there's an amused acceptance that, in our heads we all make perfect sense, while in the world we will spend a good deal of time bumping into each other in pursuit of our desires.

The psychological insights keep coming: Theseus has dumped Ariadne on a desert island, where she does nothing but cry and alternate between the fantasy of his return or the prospect that she'll die of love. Not only does this capture the self-aggrandizement and social isolation of depression, but the intrusion of brightly costumed clowns is pretty much exactly how the depressed person views the rest of humanity.

Her coterie of sob sisters, Naiad (Joanna Foote), Dryad (Jenni Bank), and Echo (Jennifer Edwards) know better--they move slowly in demure lavender gowns and don't raise their voices. Admittedly, Echo gets distracted by other people--that's just how she is.

After we've heard Ariadne suffer (thanks to the vocal magnificence of Marcy Stonikas, who has an Antony Hegarty-like bitter chocolate to her blues singing and a credibly princess-like physical grace), we also get Zerbinetta's side. Megan Hart plays her like a burlesque star, flashing ruffled panties and tottering about on boots--she acts up a storm, but she can't quite toss off those runs of high notes effortlessly yet, which is the operatic means of seduction.

Where Ariadne is fixated, Zerbinetta can't get a lock on who she wants, which is its own series of parting stings. She's just not going to curl up in a cave and cry about it. As she tells Ariadne, in a fine example of Buddhist reframing, maybe she should look around to see if anyone else has had a broken heart.

Meanwhile there's a lot of gags from the rest of the troupe, Harlequin (Michael Krzankowski, the night I went), Truffaldino (Erik Anstine), Brighella (Alex Mansoori), and Scaramuccio (Bray Wilkins). Failing in cheering up Ariadne, they fall back on their usual shtick of picking up on Zerbinetta. Depending on who you are, these are either welcome interruptions from Ariadne's lachrymose meditations or distractions from it. Jonathan Dean's sometimes loosely translated supratitles join in the fun, as when one suitor invites Zerbinetta to come up and see his Greek etchings.

If your heart is with the commedia, the final minutes of Ariadne may stretch a bit, as Bacchus (Gregory Carroll) rolls up and there's one final obstacle to be overcome: not packing your last bad break-up with you. Bacchus has just departed Circe's island, after she tried to turn him into a pig, and he's suspicious now of island-dwelling women. Ariadne thinks at first he's Theseus returned, but then is convinced this must be Death. This is the talking-past-each-other part of the first date.

For the opera fan, these minutes are the good stuff--Stonikas and Carroll deliver the vocal goods (Bernard Jacobson backs me up on this). Carroll's tenor is big and has a warm cherry wood core, and if he summons the ringing trumpet side of his instrument too consistently, it's hard to blame him. Conductor Brian Garman gets a strong evening's performance from the Auburn Symphony Orchestra, who are sitting right there onstage, but Stonikas and Carroll sail right over the top.

Director Peter Kazaras is everywhere in this production--from the decision to pop the orchestra out of a too-small pit, to the playful tweaking and expanding of the Composer pants role so that there's an entirely apropos Sapphic romance sparked in the Prologue that plays out all evening. As Gavin Borchert mentions, his staging of Zerbinetta's aria so that she's flirting with the Composer lends an extra dash of dramatic spice. I suspect him, too, of perpetrating the visual pun of Echo's character (she's always waving and jumping up and down when she sees someone).