Recorded live at Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Lewes, March 2013
Soile Isokoski (Ariadne), Kate Lindsey (Composer), Laura Claycomb (Zerbinetta), Sergey Skorokhodov (Bacchus), Thomas Allen (Music Master), Dmitri Vargin (Harlequin), James Kryshak (Scaramuccio), Torben Jürgens (Truffaldino), Andrew Stenson (Brighella), Ana Maria Labin (Naiad), Gabriela Iştoc (Echo), Adriana Di Paola (Dryad), William Relton (Major-Domo), Frederick Long (Lackey), Michael Wallace (Wig-Maker), Stuart Jackson (Officer)
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Vladimir Jurowski (conductor) & Katharina Thoma (director)
Director Katharina Thoma sets Richard Strauss’s comedy in a country house in the South Downs (a surrogate for Glyndebourne), immediately before and during the Second World War. Hofmannsthals’ conceit – that a hapless young composer has to accept the simultaneous performance of his new tragic opera with a burlesque from a commedia dell’arte troupe - is turned into a touching wartime drama of nurses, invalids, airmen – and of painful delusions and soul-searching, before final happiness.
Excellent cast led by Thomas Allen as the Music Master and Soile Isokoski as Ariadne.
Extra features: When Two Worlds Collide, Thomas Allen at Glyndebourne, Vladimir Jurowski on his final production as Music Director and a cast gallery.
