Following the success of Der Rosenkavalier, composer Richard Strauss teamed up again with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the great modernist playwright and critic, for an intriguing blend of Greek Myth and commedia dell’arte. The result of this collaboration, the third of six between composer and librettist, was Ariadne auf Naxos. Inspired, in part, by Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and the Greek legend of Ariadne, the opera refers back to Strauss’ earlier Elektra with its interest in classical material, while pointing the way towards his final opera Capriccio with its meta-theatrical spin on operatic themes and conventions. Along with Der Rosenkavalier and Salomé, it is one of the most beloved and oft staged of Strauss’ works.

Ariadne’s perennial appeal and allure was much in evidence Tuesday night at the Metropolitan Opera, during the final performance of the revival of Elijah Moshinsky’s dazzling production. Ariadne consists of a prologue and one act. The prologue opens on a dinner party given by the richest man in Vienna. Singers, dancers and musicians have been hired to provide the evening’s entertainment, which we learn consists of the premiere of a serious dramatic once-act opera, the work of a young, temperamental composer, followed by a light commedia dell-arte act. The host insists that both productions end promptly by 9pm for a firework display. When dinner lasts longer than anticipated, the host changes his mind and instead orders the two performances to occur simultaneously. Despite protestations on the part of the composer, the necessary last-minute alterations are made.

The second act is the performance of the one-act opera Ariande auf Naxos with the addition of clowning and buffoonery courtesy of the comedians. As the forlorn Ariande sings of her abandonment on the island of Naxos, the comedians chime in inappropriately with words of support and good cheer. The head of the troupe, the singer/dancer Zerbinetta makes light of Ariande’s plight, singing of the fickleness of the human heart and foreshadowing the titular character’s subsequent good fortune. Bacchus arrives on Naxos and Ariadne, mistaking him for Hermes, hopes for death’s release. Instead, they fall passionately for each other. Through the power of love, Ariadne is transfigured and she joins Bacchus up to his heavenly abode. As one might gather, Ariadne is not an opera to be viewed or heard for its plot. Rather, its most intriguing feature, the complex texture of a mellifluous and lyrical score, is brought out chiefly by the rich variety of characters who people the opera. The superb work of an impressive cast brought these characters vividly to life. Although limited to the prologue, the composer is among one of Strauss’ most ardent and tempestuous creations. Inhabiting the role was the veteran Strauss mezzo Susan Graham. She exhibited the same vocal acuity and theatrical exuberance that she brought to her portrayal of Octavian in last season’s production of Rosenkavalier. As the music master, whose role is likewise limited to the prologue, the British baritone Thomas Allen delivered a calm and forceful interpretation. As for the opera-within-the-opera, Jon Villars made an impressive debut as the onstage/offstage Bacchus. He was suitably bold, singing with deep earthy coloring during the bulk of his performance in the final scene. That said, his voice seems to practically erupt, at times, into shouting that suffered, it must be admitted, from too much of a quiver. As the Prima Donna who assumes the part of Ariande, the Lithuanian soprano Violeta Urmana delivered remarkably. Her voice rang out crystal clear and she navigated the roller coaster of Strauss’ vocal writing with dexterity and ease, resulting in a performance that was close to perfect. Only occasionally did her high notes fall a bit flat, and her voice wore a bit thin. The evening’s most wondrous surprise, however, was the company debut of Diana Damrau, as the giddy and coquettish Zerbinetta. Hers is a particularly delicious role as it presents the singer the opportunity to express a wide range of emotions and dramatic sensibilities, from irony to satire to slapstick to honesty. Whatever card she played, her singing was strong, forceful and assured, equally capable of Wagnerian lyricism or Mozartian vocalization (Konstanze in Entführung aus dem Serail is another role in her repertory). At the performance I attended, she nearly stole the show for a deliriously fun and exhausting scene wherein she cavorts around with the company’s harlequin, for which she received a five-minute ovation mid-performance. In the pit, Kirill Petrenko, the audacious and exciting music director of Berlin’s Komische Oper led the significantly reduced orchestra – 37 members only - in a clear and balanced performance.

Now in his second year as Musical Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine brought his ensemble to Carnegie Hall this week to show off their expert musicianship in a way that highlighted his own creative programming. Monday night’s concert consisted of pieces by Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Lukas Foss and Elliott Carter that spanned the entirety of 20th century American music (and sneaking into the 21st). The variety of musical styles represented by four very different musical works emphasized the versatility and enthusiasm of the musicians.

The program opened with a remarkably restrained performance of Ives’ Three Places in New England (1912-29), the earliest piece on the program. The ominous pulsing and finely adjusted dynamic levels in the first of three movements, “St. Gaudens,” brought out the work’s expressionistic shadings. The successive lines of basses, winds and piano were all completely audible. The second movement, “Putnam’s Camp” was marked by a plaintive oboe and crisp piano nestled in between a musical depiction of July 4th festivities. The patriotic sentiments die down in the final movement, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” whose complex textures resembled a Bernard Herrmann score in Levine’s reading.

The second work on the program, Lukas Foss’ Time Cycle (1960) is a musical setting of disparate texts: poems by Auden and Housman; an except from Kafka’s diary; and some lines from Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. The wonderful soprano Dawn Upshaw was on hand to sing the short, serial works. She delivered the Auden with purely dramatic effect that, while not exactly matching the tone of the poem all that well, was audibly distinctive, lurking somewhere in the neighboring regions of Sprechgesang. Her voice held up for the dynamic and tonal shifts - not to mention the large intervals - of the Housman poem.

The Kafka entry, with its cutting and frantic music builds and builds with internal madness and momentum. Upshaw glided through the Berg-like sonorities of Foss’ vertiginous music that one feels she’d make a marvelous Lulu. The last movement saw Levine making the orchestra progressively sparser as Upshaw spoke and over primordial-sounding phrases. The orchestra joined in with her, counting along with Nietzsche’s text in whispers.

After intermission came the most contemporary of the evening’s offerings, the New York premiere of Elliott Carter’s Three Illusions. Comprised of three short movements, respectively named for an episode in Don Quixote, the Roman myth of the fountain of youth, and Thomas More’s Utopia, the piece sounded alternately playful and menacing, drawing on and subverting the genre of classic Hollywood film scores.

The jewel in the already richly decorated crown was a spirited and thrilling performance of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F Major (1925). The soloist, the formidable French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, was in excellent form and very much at home in Gershwin’s jazz-infused world. His playing was energetic and spry, perfectly matched to Levine’s brisk tempo and varied dynamics and the musicians overpowered Thibaudet only rarely. For soloist and orchestra, the closing piece was half-an hour’s worth of inspired fun.

Most of the buzz surrounding the Atom Egoyan’s new film Where the Truth Lies has had precious little to do with the sure-handed direction, distinctive style and riveting performances. The single most talked-about factor surrounding the much-anticipated film’s release is its rating: NC-17. This is a shame, considering that this meticulously detailed exploration of celebrity, sexuality and crime is one of the year’s best films and ranks among the director’s finest. Last Friday, after a preview screening at Florence Gould Hall, Egoyan and the film’s producer Robert Lantos, sat down with David Schwartz, chief curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image, to discuss the powerful film and the surrounding controversy.

Adapted from a 2003 novel by Rupert Holmes, Where the Truth Lies tells of a determined journalist’s quest to solve the mystery of the death of a college-aged girl whose body was found in the bathtub of a hotel suite belonging to the 1950s comedy team of Lanny and Vince (a thinly–veiled version of Martin and Lewis). Investigating the crime almost twenty years later, the young journalist becomes entrenched in the broken lives of the former entertainers and is willing to go to any lengths to discover what put an end to an innocent girl’s life and the duo’s partnership. Recreating both the world of the 1950s and the 1970s, Egoyan has crafted a nourish pulp worthy of Billy Wilder, but with the visual acuity of Stanley Kubrick. His deranged and harrowing treatment of celebrity owes much to David Luch’s Mulholland Drive and Bob Fosse’s Star 80.
“I wanted to create that world as vividly as possible and the attraction to that world and that idea that you could be in a place where - it was unbridled - that anything you wanted was at your disposal, and that you were living in some sort of place were there was no moral consequence.”

In films such as Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter and The Adjuster, Egoyan has explored how characters are transformed by their professions. Here he takes the professional worlds of showbiz and journalism and applies his characteristically cynical angle.
“I’m always interested in people’s jobs, what they do, And how there are certain ways the job changes you…Entertainers are fascinating because they have these personas and these legends and legacies that they have to live up to.”

Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth bring the act of Lanny and Vince to life in vivid and often horrifying ways. Bacon delivers one of his finest performances as Lanny, the wild, unpredictable and unhinged side of a comic duo. Colin Firth inhabits the courteous and gentlemanly Vince with finesse and restraint. “I began to think about the team in almost a Freudian way, like ego and id. And if you look back from Abbot and Costello to Laurel and Hardy, there was always this one character who was untethered and capable of veering off into any territory and one who always had to reign him back.”

As the investigating journalist, new-comer Alison Lohman is slightly less compelling. She often delivers her lines with too much sincerity, which results in a performance that toes the line between intense and hokey. Her character is at once daring and naïve, frequently stumbling, but determined to uncover the truth. “In the 50s, a celebrity could probably still maintain and control their image. And in the 70s, that began to change. And she’s sort of at the cusp of that, that New Journalism where we expect it to go further and we expect the journalist to take us further and implicate herself.” And implicate herself she does, first by sleeping with Lanny and later getting engaging in some drug-induced lesbian activity, which was one of several scenes to which the MPAA objected. What the film ratings board found most shocking, however, is an orgy scene that Egoyan rightly insists, is key to understanding the film.
“I’ve always felt that the sexual life of the characters is as interesting as anything else. I mean, how they actually express themselves erotically is one of the things I’ve always explored.” Egoyan sees a worthy challenge in exploring his characters’ sexuality. “There are the sexual scenes, which are genuine and are a reflection of their feelings. And there’s the other ones that are quite manipulative and feel manipulative and feel exploitive, even. So I love the challenges involving different shooting styles and all these different types of sexual encounters.”

While highly realistic, none of the scenes are graphic in nature. Given their instrumentality to the film, and the very un-provocative nature of the film taken as a whole, Egoyan feels the rating was both unwarranted and unfair. “I was surprised by the response, because I don’t find it transgressive. I don’t find it that extreme. But certainly we had a real issue with the MPAA and that came out of nowhere.” Egoyan feels that he and his film have been grossly misunderstood by the ratings board. More than anything, Egoyan would like it if people could judge his film on the basis of its own merits, rather that the stigma of the NC-17. “It is de facto censorship because it means that the film can’t be shown in a lot of theatres and it can’t be advertised in a lot of newspaper chains. It’s odd to me because the film’s ultimately fun and entertaining. It’s not the kind of film you want to go up on a soapbox for and start talking about freedom of expression. But it sort of ended up having to be that way.”