Ariadne auf Naxos /Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre /Hong Kong /Feb 22, 2024 /Ernest Wan / This year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival officially opened with the Bayerische Staatsoper’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’s opera, in its 1916 version. There was concern that Hongkongers might not warm to the spareness of Robert Carsen’s 2008 production. However, judging from the enthusiastic audience response, such concern seems to have been unnecessary, so engaging was the bustle in the first part of the work and so riveting the steadily sustained momentum in the second. In the opera-within-an-opera of this second part, the desert island of Naxos on which the princess Ariadne has been deserted was an empty stage in utter darkness. As the young god Bacchus emerged and at the end ascended with her to the heavens, light emanated through an ever-widening upstage slit and eventually engulfed the entire stage. Few objects other than dance mirrors were used for the set of even the first part, which shows onstage the frantic backstage preparations for the drama of the …