Strauss’s Elektra, Patrice Chereau’s final opera production for the Aix en Provence Festival in 2013, is out on DVD. Seen in close-up, it is a searing experience and a fine memorial to one of the most interesting opera directors of our time, who died a few months after his staging of the piece. The German soprano Evelyn Herlitzus sings the title-role, with Waltraud Meier and and Adrianne Pieczonka as the two other outsize female members of Strauss’s Sophocles adaptation. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts,
More often than not, Strauss’s family drama seems like a piece of grand guignol along the lines of the New Yorker’s Addams Family. But that is the way directors like to direct it, and conductors, with 111 orchestral players at their disposal, conduct it. This version, abrasive though it sometimes us, is not like that at all. The three women are not grotesque caricatures but startlingly human. Elektra’s final dance of triumph is not clod-hopping, as it was when Birgit Nilsson danced it at the Edinburgh Festival in the 1970s, but stops well short of ridicule. Only Mikhail Petrenko’s blank Orestes stands on the brink of being a sort of Boris Karloff.
Yet to call this a subdued Elektra would depend on what you mean by the word subdued. Coming from Chereau, whose centenary Ring cycle revolutionised Bayreuth in 1976, it is an updated family drama of the subtlest sort. Apart from the gratuitous dumb show of mop-wielding charwomen at the start, nothing is overstated. Small roles are exquisitely drawn. The Orchestra de Paris produces beauty of tone, even at the most blockbuster moments.
The production, a co-production with some of the world’s most distinguished opera houses, is now on tour and seems to have survived Chereau’s death. But this DVD, showing what it was like in his sadly short lifetime, is what to spend your money on.
17 April 2015
More often than not, Strauss’s family drama seems like a piece of grand guignol along the lines of the New Yorker’s Addams Family. But that is the way directors like to direct it, and conductors, with 111 orchestral players at their disposal, conduct it. This version, abrasive though it sometimes us, is not like that at all. The three women are not grotesque caricatures but startlingly human. Elektra’s final dance of triumph is not clod-hopping, as it was when Birgit Nilsson danced it at the Edinburgh Festival in the 1970s, but stops well short of ridicule. Only Mikhail Petrenko’s blank Orestes stands on the brink of being a sort of Boris Karloff.
Yet to call this a subdued Elektra would depend on what you mean by the word subdued. Coming from Chereau, whose centenary Ring cycle revolutionised Bayreuth in 1976, it is an updated family drama of the subtlest sort. Apart from the gratuitous dumb show of mop-wielding charwomen at the start, nothing is overstated. Small roles are exquisitely drawn. The Orchestra de Paris produces beauty of tone, even at the most blockbuster moments.
The production, a co-production with some of the world’s most distinguished opera houses, is now on tour and seems to have survived Chereau’s death. But this DVD, showing what it was like in his sadly short lifetime, is what to spend your money on.
17 April 2015
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