Atom Egoyan’s Salome: Review

Directed by Atom Egoyan. Johannes Debus, conductor. Canadian Opera Company. To May 22. Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, 145 Queen St. W. 416-363-8231 (coc.ca)

In terms of musical quality, it was third time lucky for Atom Egoyan’s take on the 1905 Richard Strauss opera Salome for the Canadian Opera Company at the Four Seasons Centre on Sunday afternoon.

But the staging itself, first unveiled in 1996 and last seen in 2002, is starting to show its age.

The combination of grunge-modern set and projection of videos was novel 17 years ago. As well, buried memories of sexual abuse were hot topics, thanks to news of horrors from schools and residential churches.

In this story, Salome takes a shine to John the Baptist, who is being held captive by her father, King Herod. John spurns Salome’s advances, so, in return for a provocative dance for Herod, Salome demands John’s head on a silver platter.

Egoyan’s layering of modern concerns atop the Biblical tale has worn a bit thin. Catherine Zuber’s costumes look like castoffs from a sci-fi B movie and Derek McLane’s crazy-angled set is plain ugly.

Michael Whitfield deserves credit for very effective shadow work with his lighting, helping to give Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils a particularly off-kilter quality.

We need to be thankful for a fantastic cast and the glorious work of the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra under music director Johannes Debus.

Strauss’s weirdly ambiguous score, which careens from rich post-Romanticism to the precipice of atonality for 100 minutes, has rarely sounded more fully fleshed out.

Salome’s infamous dance was a full-body experience, thanks to the orchestra’s intensity.

The cast, containing many local singers alongside COC débuts, is uniformly strong. The biggest revelation was Swedish-American soprano Erika Sunnegardh as Salome, who more than held her own against the orchestral swells. She not only sang with power and beauty, but brought an affecting physical vulnerability to her role.

Canadian tenor Richard Margison was a treat as an alcohol- and drug-addled King Herod. Hanna Schwarz was strong as Herodias and Martin Gantner brought suitable angst to the short but intense time John the Baptist spends on stage. (Alan Held shares this role with Gantner over the course of the remaining seven performances.)

It has been more than 100 years since Salome first kissed John’s severed head in Strauss’s opera — 120 years in the case of the Oscar Wilde play that inspired it. But people at the Four Seasons Centre still gasped when they saw this on Sunday afternoon.

The music packs the same punch as that image — and that is reason enough to check it out.