Ariadne has but one intermission, and it is interminable, since time must be allowed for full dinner service at the Grand Tier Restaurant, which usually divides courses between intermissions. (It’s a nice thing to do, incidentally, if your credit card isn’t smoking and you can snag a spot on the pecking order. But a Proposal: on single-intermission evenings, why not serve the entree course before the show starts!? Ariadne should have us in and out in something like 2:20. It took about 2:55.) Light food-and-drink service up at Balcony level not having been restored since its pandemic suspension, we leaned against the end of the deserted bar, where, throughout the intermission, patrons queued up to discover the water fountains to be out of order. While I scanned the artist roster for a likely candidate for the Komponist, my wife prevailed upon a front-of-house person to phone down to the press office for the information, which I’ll duly provide below. At length, the opera proper did begin. Given the current climate, it wasn’t surprising that at the conclusion of “Es gibt ein Reich,” a sports-stadium ovation ensued—though I don’t remember that ever happening before at this point, and the score clearly indicates an accelerating continuity into the comedians’ quartet. What was surprising was the pause of one or two beats, marked by signals from stage and podium, that invited applause, rather than an effort to play on through. Shortly thereafter, a similar uproar greeted the end of “Grossmächtige Prinzessin,” which is constructed as a show-stopping display piece. This time, as the applause died, an impressively loud braying or honking noise broke out to our left—a male voice shouting something, though we couldn’t pick it up. My colleague, sitting downstairs, also heard it, and also couldn’t make it out. But upon investigation, he learned that the voice had been bellowing “Madam, you have no technique!“—which in turn recalled the protests of inaudibility at the Trittico performance a while back. (See Puccini’s Trittico: WHAT?, 12/14/18.) Some of the surviving natives are growing restless.

The performance’s outstanding attractions, both in prospect and in realization, were the conductor, Marek Janowski, and the leading soprano, Lise Davidsen. Janowski teased from his chamber orchestra playing of great sweetness, warmth, and balance in the preludes to prologue and opera, and within the sung scenes, for all the mismatch between opera and house, managed to keep the sound present and proportionate with a cast of wildly disproportionate endowments, and still not cheat the climactic passages. (I’ve never lost my sense of awe at the gorgeous clatter Strauss sets up with his modest-sized complement in these moments, capped by the appearance of Bacchus.) Of course, he still had to keep a rein: the strings, for instance, could not sing out with a true accented fortissimo in the two bars after Zerbinetta’s “betrüg ich ihn endlich” (one of my favorite moments), because the dynamic framework has to set by the limitations of the singers. Janowski respected those limitations, yet kept the score alive.