<<  -- 5 --  Roderic Dunnett    A NIGHT TO REMEMBER

Latterday magic fire music over, the wash of oboe, clarinet and harp is as wafting as Schreker's elusive tinkles (Der Ferne Klang had just wowed stages all over Germany by the time of Ariadne mark 1). Hoffmansthal's text is as scented as Oscar Wilde for this post-Salome Bacchus scene (Strauss would tread similar ground with the later Daphne (1926-7) and Die Liebe der Danae (1938-40, though not premièred complete till Salzburg in 1952). Brubaker's description of his mother Semele's demise, with its impossibly beguiling alternations of high and low tessitura -- echoed at the opera's close -- was as bewitching as his carousing costume (he looked like E T A Hoffmann on a bad day out) was -- deliberately -- not. There are, after all, echoes of Shakespeare's Petruchio in Hoffmansthal's neo-Baroque divertissement.

On hearing that weird accordion-like sound in the orchestra, no wonder Ariadne (like her only begetter, Koch's beautifully obsessive Composer) believes he's Death -- gateway to not just sexual bliss but a starry universe. As lighting designer Jennifer Tipton's myriad constellations appeared, swirling across the cyclorama, this proved a heavenly apotheosis : 'What is this spell, that one kiss, and I cease to be Ariadne?' The spell, mostly is the (real) composer's music : bassoon and xylophone nursing the couple's ensemble ('When a new god appears we surrender completely') -- the motto, in effect , of the opera; the departing players (Bliss's pumpkinised Olympians yet again); the touching exit of Nicholls's Echo, in a welter of reds and blues; and the resurrected Ariadne's exit into redeeming blue light. Shades of Titanic, perhaps; but a night to remember.