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Neil Armfield (Director)
Commedia is ten times as hard when set in the relatively rigid framework of a musical score, as it is in Ariadne. No, a thousand times harder. You have to make the timing natural to the music. It’s something you can only find in rehearsal. You can’t decide it in advance. The only way to build something organically is for us all to discover it and to develop it simultaneously. It means going in with a sense of what it might be, but with no specific sense of where it’s going to arrive, so it is a blind leap of faith. More
Erik Nielsen (Conductor)
Bigger is not better. Strauss of course is known for Elektra and Die Frau ohne Schatten: massive and/or long works. In Ariadne, Strauss starts with a chamber orchestra and reduces it even further to a chamber ensemble for a large portion of the piece. He addresses issues of text and/versus music, which he deals with further in Capriccio, and also mythology and theater. It's also refreshing not to be dealing with blood and guts and murder and revenge. I think all composers have moments of "reduction" in their writing (often because of economic factors), and the products are most often highly stimulating works. More
Marjorie Owens (Ariadne)
The plot as far as the Prima Donna/Ariadne is concerned is interesting. It allows me to show different levels of the character. I'm essentially an opera singer playing an opera singer playing a Greek heroine. It's great fun to be such a caricature lashing out at everyone in the beginning and then settling down into such a regal, earnest character for the opera. More
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