Price Meets "Ariadne"
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music PRICE MEETS ARIADNE' BY'M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH People who write copy for record jackets have to make claims for their product even when there is not much to say. That is probably why, on...
...Stage directors of late have been quick to agree, and because the Prima Donna of the Prologue is vain and haughty, it has become common practice to try to puncture Ariadne's balloon on the needle of Zerbinetta's irony...
...That is probably why, on the back of Leontyne Price Sings Richard Strauss (RCA ARL 1-0333), it was suggested that Strauss might well be the composer with whom Miss Price has the "greatest affinity...
...As for the Four Last Songs, they were written with Kirsten Flagstad in mind, and that warmest and most golden of dramatic sopranos sang them at their world premiere under Wil-helm Furtwangler in 1950...
...Price may have been the first since Flagstad to sing the score with such womanly fullness, and she brought to it a tawny sensuality utterly different from Flagstad's Junoesque calm...
...What is commonplace for Zerbinetta is for Ariadne a miracle, and Zerbinetta can't even recognize a miracle when she sees one...
...Her quick vibrato is exciting in this music, and when she decides to stop sobbing her chest tones, she will be better still...
...In addition, toward the end of her second monologue, Price was hurried along by conductor Janos Ferencsik and took the dotted rhythms coltishly...
...Fred Callands, host of the San Francisco broadcasts, interviewed her during intermission, and she spoke feelingly of the integrity of Ariadne's character and the sensuality of her music...
...The people who write (he copy for that jacket shouldn't have any trouble at all...
...Tatiana Troyanos sang the Composer in the Prologue with great style...
...at times the tempo made her turn gruff...
...Zerbinetta, the bewitching leader of the clowns, momentarily mollifies the fuming Composer, and even the fiery Prima Donna, who is to sing Ariadne, is cajoled into going along...
...The Prologue shows the preparations for a private theatrical in the palace of the richest man in Vienna...
...Calland's knowledge appears to be enormous and his interviewing technique is definitely adroit...
...Price's full, smouldering tone in these taxing phrases conveyed not merely sorrow but a grandeur of passion that hinted at Ariadne's capacity for the rapture that awaits her with Bacchus...
...Now that Price has at last attempted her first Strauss heroine, however, he seems a true prophet...
...At the beginning of each of her two monologues, thinking on death, Ariadne plunges below the staff: What the listener hears in too many performances is drab, raspy speech or growling that expresses grief by default or by the hearer's courtesy alone...
...Where the lines sweep upward in bold leaps, Price scaled them easily, and her jubilation in imagining the merciful messenger of death rang out with true heroic spirit...
...The Marschallin's monologue in Der Rosenkavalier, by contrast, finds Strauss at his most conversational and Mozartean...
...The clowns try to cheer her up—Zerbinetta, in a showstopping coloratura aria, sings the joys of fickleness—but Ariadne withdraws in silence...
...His manner takes getting used to—he seems stuffily puckish—but he asks bright questions and thus enables his guests, who almost invariably respond with vivacity and charm, to illuminate without pontificating...
...And often, without committing errors of taste or judgment, she simply seemed miscast...
...Moreover, the material differs, in both spirit and technical demands, from the repertoire that has shown Price at her best...
...The problems never had to do, as one might have expected, with timbre...
...It is a strange record...
...Ruth Welting, cautious rather than jaunty in some of Zerbinetta's more elaborate embroidery, was nevertheless sparkling much of the time...
...In all, the disc cast doubt on the RCA copy writer's further claim that this was a "foretaste of even greater triumphs to come...
...At the final curtain, Zerbinetta steps out of the wings to comment that she and Ariadne are really very much alike...
...Through error and misadventure, they fall under each other's spell...
...In spots Ferencsik led the 37-piece orchestra at too smart a clip, but the playing throughout was articulate and sensitive...
...Yet the sophisticates who regard Ariadne's poetic transformation as the equivalent of Zerbinetta's quick-stepping round are the real dupes...
...The piogram of the 1974 disc, featuring the New Philharmonia Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf, includes the Four Last Songs and selections from Der Rosenkavalier, Die Frau ohne Schatten and the early opera Cuntram...
...As the Germans say, Wenn zwei dasselbe tun, ist es nicht dasselbe—when two people do the same thing, it's not the same thing...
...Strauss' opera shows the curiously intertwined presentation...
...In the closing scene, the long duet with Bacchus, Price's voice was so limpid and her manner so artless that despite vast stylistic differences, she resembled the greatest Ariadne of all—Maria Reining, whose Mediterranean transparency graced the gala performance for Strauss' 80th birthday in 1944...
...In sound and personality, she was no closer to the "typical" Strauss soprano than on the recital disc...
...He has commissioned from a young composer an opera seria, "Ariadne auf Naxos," to be premiered that evening...
...Bacchus mistakes her too, for another Circe...
...Mistaking him for the messenger of death, Ariadne declares herself ready to board his ship...
...In any event, Leontyne Price has, in the space of a full role, proved that her distinctive gifts have something valuable to add to our understanding of Strauss...
...Suddenly the nymphs of the island spy a ship heading toward shore...
...Unfortunately, they were quickly appropriated by comparative pipsqueaks...
...And unlike most sopranos who take the part, she was not defeated by its wide range...
...Price's comments were amply borne out in the performance...
...once one has heard it, though, nothing in the Schwarzkopf line (with the possible exception of Schwarzkopf herself) will do...
...Flagstad's reading ought to be definitive but is hard to come by...
...The reading was not perfect...
...This is where, with deft touches of phrase and inflection, subtle Viennese ladies often score their most telling effects...
...The difference in scale between the Marschallin's music and the Empress' did not trouble her, and her singing everywhere was marked by intelligence and tonal opulence...
...Still, her vinous timbre and moody passion set her so far apart from what is customary that she never stopped sounding idiosyncratic...
...his contributions genuinely enhance the broadcasts...
...To perk up the guests after this highbrow entertainment, the master has also hired commedia dell'arte players who will put on a comic interlude between the opera and the crown of the occasion —fireworks in the garden...
...Some grace notes were sung at a laggard pace that distorted phrases where they should only glint...
...Ariadne auf Naxos is one of the oddest operas in the literature...
...But perhaps this music has too long been kept the preserve of too limited a range of musicians...
...The claim came as rather a surprise: She had never sung a single Strauss opera on the stage or performed a complete Strauss role on records...
...Undismayed, the clowns merrily perform their own circle dance of seduction and betrayal...
...She bowed as Ariadne in Ariadne au/Naxos last season in San Francisco, and thanks to the National Public Radio network (see "Tuning in to Opera," NL, November 21, 1977) music lovers nationwide could listen in on an outstanding performance...
...She launched the Prima Donna's few imperious lines in the Prologue as great comic flares, yet her portrayal of Ariadne was unfailingly majestic...
...Here the smoky veil of tragedy lifted from Price's voice, and she became a creature of sheer radiance...
...Ariadne, princess of Crete, after helping Theseus slay the Minotaur and eloping with him, has been abandoned by the hero on the desert island of Naxos, where we find her grieving and awaiting death...
...His whims being as uncertain as his taste, he decides moments before curtain to have the two stage offerings given simultaneously...
...Ariadne auf Naxos is not an easy opera to perform, and it is a special pleasure to report that Price's heroine was surrounded by a worthy cast...
...As Bacchus, Allen Cathcart displayed the winning boyishness the part demands...
...Price's handling of the entire wildly matched program was in many ways remarkably successful...
...In passing, a word on Calland's introductions and intermission features...
...Leontyne Price has now gone off to London to record Ariadne under Sir Georg Solti...
...The Guntram aria (frankly derivative of the Wagner of Lohengrin and Tannhdusef) and the Empress' awakening scene from Die Frau ohne Schatten each calls for a dramatic soprano in the Teutonic mold, whose declamations must cleave the thunderous orchestra like a sword of flame...
...Although not every type of Strauss writing for the soprano voice is represented, there is 3 wider range of styles than most singers would find it advisable to attempt...
...Easily the best among these was Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who with her mincing, "exquisite" performances set standards that singers of this music are still judged by...
...Price's understanding of the role is deep and clear...
...At the prow stands the youthful god Bacchus, fresh from his escape from the wiles of Circe, who tried after her fashion to transform him into a beast...
Vol. 61 • January 1978 • No. 2
