Music / Der Rosenkavalier… a love triangle reduction, director Caroline Stacey, musical director Rowan Harvey Martin. At The Street Theatre, until August 31. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.
Richard Strauss’ deeply yearning opera about love and age and loss has been shortened for this National Opera Canberra production, but this has enabled an illuminating focus on the opera’s central triangle and its meditations on human passions.
At its core is the Marschallin (Sarah Darnley Stuart), unsatisfactorily married and dallying with the much younger Octavian (Sonia Anfiloff).
Enter Baron Ochs (Jim Black), older, predatory, but aiming for a marriage with the young Sophie Von Faninal (Erika Simons). He needs a well born candidate to be Der Rosenkavalier, the bearer of a silver rose to his intended to signify their engagement.
Octavian is sent with the rose but he and Sophie fall in love on sight.
Meantime, there is a subplot involving Octavian in disguise as the giggly maid Mariandel trapping the baron into showing his real nature.
At the end three people are left contemplating what has happened. The two young lovers rejoice. The Marschallin lets Octavian go, with much reflecting on the nature of love and the cycle of life.
It’s a modern dress production with surtitles to assist those with no German to cope with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto and a calmly good-humoured narrator in Simon Bailey pours the drinks and fills in the gaps.
The music and the singing are splendid. The small orchestra under Rowan Harvey-Martin supports the work with verve, doing some justice to the big swooping score.
The characters are clear and their dilemmas emerge strongly. Anfiloff’s Octavian takes on an increasing seriousness of purpose as he finds himself falling for the younger Sophie and leaving the older Marschallin behind. There’s a good vein of humour in Octavian’s moments of disguise as the flirty Mariandel.
Simons as Sophie is charming and perceptive, seeing all too clearly why she should not marry Ochs.
Black as the dreadful Ochs is a nasty old piece of work and Wayne Miller as Sophie’s father Faninal suitably tone-deaf to her predicament.
But hovering above all these is Darnley Stuart’s calmly passionate Marschallin, seeing so clearly why love must move on to the young.
The uncredited set and lighting keep things lushly simple with much use of deep reds and blues, long red couches and large white paper roses strewn around. The warmth is intensified by placing the small orchestra at the side of the stage rather than a pit so action and music are warmly contained together.
This is a marvellous opportunity to gain some understanding of a modern opera classic.
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