A highly-focused new reduction of Richard Strauss’s famous opera Der Rosenkavalier (the knight of the rose) is coming to the Street Theatre this weekend.

Reduction? You may ask. That’s when the score and the libretto are tightened and shortened, with the elimination of extraneous material and often bamboozling elements of the plot.

It’s an original Canberra production and that daunting work has been done by the national opera’s artistic director, soprano Sonia Anfiloff, who also takes on the central “pants role” of Octavian, the 17-year-old knight of the title and lover to the aristocratic Marschallin, played by Sarah Darnley-Stuart.

A star graduate of the ANU School Music, Anfiloff played Dido in Caroline Stacey and Geoffrey Lancaster’s production of Dido and Aeneas at the Street Theatre in 2010. After that, she went to Germany to study and back home, now teaches music at Canberra Girls’ Grammar School.

At its core, Anfiloff says, Der Rosenkavalier is a story about love, change and letting go, in which The Marschallin, a thoughtful noblewoman, feels time slipping away.

Briefly, When Octavian goes to present a silver rose to the lovely young Sophie (Erika Simons), daughter of the rich bourgeois, Faninal (Wayne Miller), in preparation for her arranged marriage to the boorish Baron Ochs (Jim Black), young love blossoms and the plot thickens.

Anfiloff has been artistic director for six months and her passion is to refocus the company on Canberra’s strong community of singers, returning to the early vision of Canberra Opera Workshop and Canberra Opera, from which the company derives.

“We’ve got excellent singers and musicians… let the voices fly,” she says.

She’s never lost her connection with Stacey, a noted opera director before she came to Canberra in 2006, and praises her approach to opera, saying “the way she interprets the music with the acting is second to none, Caroline has a gift of tapping into what the actor or singer has inside them.”

As for her role as the 17-year-old Octavian, she remembers having once been a tomboy so is enjoying bringing out the boy who has gone for a mature woman, a “cougar”, in modern terms, “but when the work was written, that’s would have been expected,” she notes.

Remarkably, Anfiloff has done the reduction herself, focusing on five main roles and bouncing ideas off music director and colleague, Rowan Harvey-Martin, to make sure that the instrumentation for wind and keyboard would work with the cuts.

“I thought, we don’t need the chorus unless we were going for a big spectacle, we wanted the eyes on the female voice.”

Anfliloff is a soprano who has also played the Marschallin in the past, while Octavian is normally a mezzo, but Strauss, she says, has written it so that you can’t see much difference between the three female registers.

Enter Stacey, who says that the focus will be on the principal characters, with just a bit of narrative to fill in the dots, but essentially looking at the relationships, the nature of love, loss and letting go.

“It still has a feeling of a comedy of manners with a good deal of buffoonery involving Baron Ochs, so there is comedy, but it leads into the romantic,” she says.“

“The heart of the narrative is the inevitability of first love between Octavian and Sophie, the nature of their instant attraction, and the situation of Octavian’s love of the Marschallin, who is fully ensconced in the society.”

She believes the reduction does not let go of Strauss’s arias and trios, and the presentation of the Silver Rose is there, but it won’t be a spectacle.

“We stress the conversational nature of the dialogue.” She adds, “It’s a distillation of the opera made possible by the nature of the writing by Strauss. There’s a lot of interaction, but cut down to essentials.”

The original is a massive operation normally running 3 to 4 hours, where social and political commentary can be emphasised, but this one runs a spare 90 minutes.

“I’ve told the cast to think of the Scandinavian Royals of today to set the tone… there are lots of those modern European royals who are still part of a long history and who still reflect those layers of society that we see in the opera, like the Baron, representing the rural nobility seen in an urban setting.”

“I guess I wanted to give them a reference point in contemporary society to explain the social mores.”

She emphasises that the contemporary idea of child abuse plays no part in the opera. The two young characters are about 17 or 18 and the Marschallin is probably around 32. The references are comic and go back to Mozart and Moliere.

Stacey likes to be provoked and challenged and to her the big challenge is the conversational manner of the work mixed with the lusciousness of the music, “like mixing oil into melted butter,” as Strauss said.

“Even those trios demand detail and the characters must live moment to moment, it’s not like chewing gum, you can’t just roll it out,” she says.

National Opera’s Der Rosenkavalier, The Street Theatre, August 23-31.