Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation

Salome – review

This article is more than 11 years old
Royal Opera House, London

Twenty-four hours after conducting the 50th-anniversary performance of Britten's War Requiem in Coventry, Andris Nelsons was taking on something completely different at Covent Garden. His previous appearances with the Royal Opera have been in Puccini, but Richard Strauss has been one of his calling cards ever since he took over at the CBSO, and the irresistible combination of realised detail and perfectly controlled dramatic sweep that he brings to the symphonic poems in the concert hall was evident in every portion of his account of Salome, which is being revived for the second time in David McVicar's production.

Nelsons has the priceless ability to bring a sense of the newly minted to the most familiar music. Here, whether giving a real dramatic urgency to the theological disputes between the Jews, a lubricious swing to the waltz section of the dance or highlighting the unearthly interventions of the off-stage organ in the final scene, he offers a startlingly vivid counterpoint to McVicar's sometimes brutal stage images, with the ROH Orchestra playing superbly for him.

The very special contribution from the pit may be the main reason to catch this particular run, but the cast is generally a tidy one, too. There's a strongly sung Naraboth from Will Hartmann, and a rather restrained, guilt-ridden Herod from Stig Anderson, while Rosalind Plowright's Herodias is refreshingly uncaricatured; it's easy to imagine her as the chic hostess of the dinner party that's going on upstairs as the gruesome events unfold beneath.

But the two central roles are problematic, in very different ways. Egils Silins's Jokanaan lacks the one ingredient without which no prophet should ever leave home – charisma – while Angela Denoke may be superbly histrionic in the final scene, and sings every note of a hugely taxing role unflinchingly, but it's hard to follow the psychological journey that has brought her to that crazed condition. Her icy poise in the early scenes hardly hints that she is the victim of abuse that McVicar's staging of her dance suggests, and there's little in her first encounters with Jokanaan to suggest the attraction that will prove fatal for both of them.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed