This week’s review of London performances by our critic in residence, Alastair Macaulay:
Everything about Richard Strauss’s opera “Salome” is specific, atmospheric, descriptive. We know where in the East we are, at what point in the history of the Near East and the evolution of Judeo-Christian religion we are, in whose palace we are and in which part of it, from which places in the palace the characters have come to enter this courtyard, and how brightly the moon is shining this evening. So it’s a tribute to Richard Strauss’s music that an opera that was designed to be compulsively watchable nonetheless keeps its grip when there’s nothing to watch but its singers and musicians in concert performance.
In the Barbican Hall’s performance on Friday 11, nobody acted, nobody danced. Antonio Pappano conducted; the London Symphony Orchestra played; the large cast of soloists was led by Asmik Grigorian (Salome), Michael Volle (Jochanaan), Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke (Herod), and Violeta Urmana (Herodias). Who needed a stage production?
Yet you couldn’t help longing to see Grigorian act the role in a good staging. She is the most beautiful Salome I’ve seen. She has already played the role elsewhere in completely staged productions; I hope that they allow her to use the amazing stillness she showed here, a stillness that makes her enigmatic, unknowable. Amid an opera where characters speak of “the redeemer or the World” offstage, Salome is driven by multiple motives: by the need to elude her lusty stepfather Herod, by her own immediate sexual attraction to the prophet Jochanaan (an attraction she describes in physical – coloristic – terms), but also by an uncompromising attraction to the otherness that Jochanaan represents, and by a petulant destructiveness that is part of her upbringing.
The nineteenth century had abounded in dramas where love led to death of one kind or another: Oscar Wilde, author of the “Salome” play from which Strauss derived his opera, made this a drama where the same love-death nexus leads all the way to necrophilia. Salome is only interested in her stepfather Herod to the degree he can grant her wishes, but she is so wholly engrossed by the riveting beauty of the prophet Jochanaan, who rebuffs her again and again, that she wishes for his decapitated head, to which she, oblivious of all else, sings at length. There’s a love-death chain here. The captain Narraboth, infatuated with Salome, kills himself when he realises how she used him. Salome in turn has her adored Johanaan executed because he has scorned her. Finally, Herod, infatuated but appalled by how she carries on with Jochanaan’s head, has her killed too. All this libido and killing takes place against complex squabbling among Nazarenes and Jews about conflicting reports of the offstage Jesus, who may or may not be the redeemer of the world.
Pappano – not a conductor I had associated with Richard Strauss – catches all the facets of “Salome”: the radical modernism (from the rippling upward clarinet gesture to the massive, crushing final chords), the Orientalism (the exotic melodic lines and irregular rhythms for the woodwind, above all in the Dance of the Seven Veils); the various twists with which sexual desire, religious fervour, ruthless willpower, and the destructive desire for death meet one another; and its sheer suspensefulness.
We know that Salome’s wishes and actions are perverse and shocking, but (Strauss’s opera is adapted from Oscar Wilde’s play “Salomé”) we also see that the morality of the prophet Jochanaan has nasty streaks of aggressive bigotry, misogyny, and intolerance, while Herod, the man of power who punishes Salome’s sins with death, is himself weak and corrupt.
Perhaps the ideal Jochanaan is halfway between the vocal purity and beauty of Peter Mattei (who sang the role at the New York Met this spring) and the unflinching force of Michael Volle, who sang the role here. Violeta Urmana (the only singer I have seen perform both Aida and Amneris) was a pithy, vivid, vehement Herodias. Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, an excellent character tenor, gave us both the lascivious and feeble sides of Herod.
Although “Salome” can be played many different ways – Herod can have the terrifying violence of Jon Vickers or the decadent lyricism of Julius Patzak – this Barbican LSO performance only failed to satisfy me in one respect: Grigorian, riveting and gorgeous as a singer, does not make Salome’s words bite. Salome has the will of the devil: she must show this in terms not just of vocal prowess but of verbal incisiveness too. (I’m still haunted by how my first Salome, Gwyneth Jones, planted words. And anyone who has heard the “Salome” recordings of Ljuba Welitsch knows how closely she married words and voice.) Even so, this was a concert performance that drew us into the music drama more than most fully staged performances.
The Wigmore Hall has run a series throughout the year combining the songs of Mendelsohn and Liszt. I’m sorry that I caught only the final concert, on July 14: almost all of the songs were new to me and surely unfamiliar to many in the audience. The baritone Roderick Williams delivers words and vocal lines ideally; the mezzosoprano Sarah Connolly, with her far more polychromatic voice, brought out further shades within the music. The accompanist Julius Drake steered them both admirably. You came out with your head full of the songs and their composers. Liszt, less than three years Mendlessohn’s junior, was far the more experimental of the two: in some of these songs he went beyond even Wagner in terms of harmony and phrasing. But Mendelssohn, the embodiment of musical charm, was never less than a master and never less than imaginative. Both composers have grown dearer to my heart.
(c) Alastair Macaulay
photo: Salzburg Festival, 2018
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