Salzburg Festival 2012: Ariadne auf Naxos

“The vocals are pure gold”, wrote the Berliner Zeitung. Emily Magee masters the challenge of her complex character’s richly nuanced vocal lines, while Elena Mosuc as Zerbinetta produced her coloratura cascades with breathtaking ease, and Jonas Kaufmann received accolades from the critics for his role debut as the “best Bacchus ever” (Berliner Zeitung). Daniel Harding and the Vienna Philharmonic provided the necessary musical foundations to this performance of Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, in a special version for the Salzburg Festival created by Sven-Eric Bechtolf of the original version from 1912. Written immediately after the great success of Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos was a combination of mythological opera and Molière’s drama Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, though Strauss expunged all trace of the latter in his second version of 1916. To mark the centenary of the first version, a sensational project has created a daring production fulfilling the composer’s original dream of a “Gesamtkunstwerk”.