It has been a difficult summer for Welsh National Opera. After several months of rumours, music director Tugan Sokhiev announced his immediate resignation last month, to be replaced by his predecessor Carlo Rizzi for the next two seasons. Rizzi's first assignment will be to restore the sense of common purpose that every opera company needs, and which seemed to seep away from WNO during the last couple of years. He is conducting the new production of Strauss's Ariadne Auf Naxos that opens the season, and first signs suggest things are already coming together.
This is a convincing staging of a problematic work. In the programme, the director Neil Armfield admits that it has taken him a long time to get to love Ariadne Auf Naxos (some of us are still working on that) and to find the emotional core beneath its layers of comedy and irony. He and designer Dale Ferguson have made the two halves of the piece as visually separate as possible - the power plays of the prologue take place backstage in a modern theatre, while Ariadne's island in the opera proper is an abstract creation of torn canvasses, with Bacchus descending like a baroque deus ex machina.
Armfield has a sure touch with all of it, showing a good eye for finely realised detail in the chaotic exchanges at the beginning - the stage team brandish slices of takeaway pizza, the Wig Maker is a flouncing, shaven-headed leather queen, the cast wander about in hairnets and slap. The commedia dell'arte element in the second half is too strenuously funny (though some people laughed) but the stage is blissfully uncluttered again for the final scene so that the emotional power of the closing duet is sharply focused.
It's all carefully paced by Rizzi, whose performance favours clear shapes rather than bland expressiveness and always gives the singers good support. Janice Watson's Ariadne is one of the best things she's done, as well sung as always but with a new expressive weight, and Peter Hoare's Bacchus is a strong-voiced foil. Alice Coote's highly strung Composer oozes emotional energy - her singing is glorious. Only Katarzyna Dondalska's Zerbinetta disappoints, but she does have to deal with a lot of strenous stage business.
· Repeated on Friday and on September 25. Box office: 029-2087 8889. Then touring.
