Richard Strauss: Elektra, The Met in HD Encore, Phoenix Picturehouse, Oxford, 3 May 2016.
Forty-eight hours after the event I am still reeling from the impact of Elektra seen as a Met Encore in Oxford. This was introduced by Renée Fleming as the last of the tenth season of such transmissions which started with her and Dmitri Hvrostovsky in Eugene Onegin in 2007. It is the 49th to be reviewed in Oxford Magazine. This production of Elektra, a co-production with a group of European companies, was originally directed by Patrice Chéreau to whose memory the performance was dedicated.
In this short opera, lasting little more than a hundred minutes, Strauss and von Hofmannsthal 5tell a version of Sophocles. Elektra brooding on means of revenge for the murder of her father Agamemnon by Klytämnestra and her lover Aegisth while awaiting the return of her brother Orest. When false rumour of Orest’s death arrives, she tries unsuccessfully to enlist the support of her sister Chrysothemis. Orest turns up and kills Klytämnestra and Aegisth. Exultant Elektra dances until she drops dead.
For the cinema audience this was a concentrated visceral experience, transcending genre. It is best described as a multilayered event, each layer contributing to the intensity of the whole. It was pure ciné-opera; one forgot it was taking place simultaneously in an opera house. At the base was the Greek Tragedy of Sophoclese. This was acted out on a single grey set of stairs and platforms, designed by Richard Peduzzi. The cast, as actors, uniformly dressed in loose grey modern dress (designed by Caroline de Vivaise), played out their parts filmed in close up and long shot under the TV Director Gary Halverson as if stars in a silent movie. Even without music, this would have been a masterpiece comparable to best of early Swedish silent films, the drama being told in their facial expressions. But all this was put together with the orchestral sound, a symphonic poem telling the story in its own terms with an augmented Met orchestra of one hundred and twenty players, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and rising above it the sound of the singers.
Klytämnestra was played by veteran Swedish soprano Waltraud Meier, conveying the haunted attempt at dignity of the murderess. Aegisth was played as a youthful toy-boy of Elektra’s generation and Adrianna Pieczonka was Crysothemis, trying to shut out all the horrors, wanting to have a good time. Orest was played by Eric Owens, a formidable figure. going off at the end, not yet pursued by Furies. But it was Nina Stemme’s Elektra which stole the show – on stage all the time, singing most of it and conveying the single-minded desire to avenge her father Agamemnon’s murder and her mother’s adultery, cajoling, defiant and ultimately triumphant. Stemme, first seen as a fragile Isolde at Glyndebourne in 2003 when she was just beginning to make a name for herself outside her native Sweden must now have assumed the mantle of the great Birgit Nilsson.
In this short opera, lasting little more than a hundred minutes, Strauss and von Hofmannsthal 5tell a version of Sophocles. Elektra brooding on means of revenge for the murder of her father Agamemnon by Klytämnestra and her lover Aegisth while awaiting the return of her brother Orest. When false rumour of Orest’s death arrives, she tries unsuccessfully to enlist the support of her sister Chrysothemis. Orest turns up and kills Klytämnestra and Aegisth. Exultant Elektra dances until she drops dead.
For the cinema audience this was a concentrated visceral experience, transcending genre. It is best described as a multilayered event, each layer contributing to the intensity of the whole. It was pure ciné-opera; one forgot it was taking place simultaneously in an opera house. At the base was the Greek Tragedy of Sophoclese. This was acted out on a single grey set of stairs and platforms, designed by Richard Peduzzi. The cast, as actors, uniformly dressed in loose grey modern dress (designed by Caroline de Vivaise), played out their parts filmed in close up and long shot under the TV Director Gary Halverson as if stars in a silent movie. Even without music, this would have been a masterpiece comparable to best of early Swedish silent films, the drama being told in their facial expressions. But all this was put together with the orchestral sound, a symphonic poem telling the story in its own terms with an augmented Met orchestra of one hundred and twenty players, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and rising above it the sound of the singers.
Klytämnestra was played by veteran Swedish soprano Waltraud Meier, conveying the haunted attempt at dignity of the murderess. Aegisth was played as a youthful toy-boy of Elektra’s generation and Adrianna Pieczonka was Crysothemis, trying to shut out all the horrors, wanting to have a good time. Orest was played by Eric Owens, a formidable figure. going off at the end, not yet pursued by Furies. But it was Nina Stemme’s Elektra which stole the show – on stage all the time, singing most of it and conveying the single-minded desire to avenge her father Agamemnon’s murder and her mother’s adultery, cajoling, defiant and ultimately triumphant. Stemme, first seen as a fragile Isolde at Glyndebourne in 2003 when she was just beginning to make a name for herself outside her native Sweden must now have assumed the mantle of the great Birgit Nilsson.