Strauss Elektra Goerke Nelsons Boston Symphony Orchestra

Richard Strauss Elektra in Boston with Andris Nelsons and Christine Goerke. Goerke "is" Elektra, like no-one else. She inhabits  the character, using her voice to channel  Elektra's turbulent emotions.  Elektra rejects everything her mother stands for, even if it means going feral. The part is merciless,  driven by wild extremes. Animal-like mutterings give way to howls of frenzied rage.  Yet Goerke takes her cue from the music around her. Even in the frenzy of her final dance, when words fail, Goerke exudes regal dignity. This performance was outstanding, by far the most intense of the three Elektras I've heard her sing.

Let us pray that the Boston Symphony Orchestra finds a way to make the broadcast more widely available, because this will be a kind of landmark. Goerke was amazing, but she was challenged and stimulated by equally exceptional orchestral playing.   Goerke and Nelsons have worked together before, and have a kind of natural chemistry,which is quite unique. When they did Strauss Elektra at the Royal Opera House in 2013, word got round even in early rehearsals that something extraordinary was going to happen. Read my review here. When the production was first done five years previously, it was misunderstood, but Nelsons and Goerke made it work. Some thought the production had changed. It hadn't. Lucky for us, it is being revived, because it's good. Hopefully, we'll get Goerke again. Last night, after the Boston performance, I thought about putting on the Aix production (Salonen/Chereau/Herlitzius) but couldn't face it.

This performance also proved why the Boston Symphony Orchestra wanted to grab Nelsons and hang onto him against all comers.  Just as there is more to singing than making sounds, there is a lot more to conducting than waving a baton. Nelsons is inspirational because he genuinely loves music. As Claudio Abbado said, that kind of love motivates creative people and fires them up to do things that those motivated by hate can't comprehend.  Listen to this interview with Christine Goerke where she explains how she works, and how singers work with conductors. What a personality, down to earth and no fool.

This superlative Elektra showed that  the BSO can rise to the challenge of a conductor who is very different, and who can push them in new  directions. Their  basic technical standards have improved greatly since I last heard them in August. Read my review of their Mahler 6th at the Proms here. (I was a lot less scathing than some.) This Elektra shows what they can do when they go outside their comfort zone. It was even  more visceral than Semyon Bychkov's Elektra with the BBC SO, where Goerke also sang with Gun-Brit Barkmin as Chrysothemis. Read my review here.  Boston Symphony Hall is a smaller place than the Royal Albert Hall, which helps concentrate the impact.
 
Now that Nelsons is taking over the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the BSO will embark on a partnership with the oldest and possibly finest orchestra in the world.  This is an unprecedented deal, which raises the bar very, very high indeed. 

Electrifying Elektra Goerke Bychkov Prom

Electrifying Strauss Elektra at BBC Proms 59 = Semyon Bychkov, Christine Goerke. Amazing on radio asnd even more so live. Indeed, this was one of those rare occasions when you can say, in awe, "I was THERE!". The Royal Albert Hall is a huge barn of a hall.  Six thousand seats placed round a hollow space that rises upwards, culminating in a dome that used to suck up sound until they added those space-age acoustic baffles.  But there's nothing like a Royal Albert Hall Prom. The atmosphere is so intense that the excitement must communicate to performers. If they've not overwhelmed (understandably) they can be challenged to give the performances of their lives.

Yet, despite the size of the Royal Albert Hall, Semyon Bychkov conducted an Elektra so full of intelligent detail that the vast cavern of the building seemed to burst with colour and incident. The BBC SO aren't normally an "opera" orchestra, so perhaps they were responding to Elektra as dramatic orchestral music. Bychkov made the music move, almost as if it were an invisible demonic force. Agamemnon has long been dead, yet his ghostly presence hangs heavy over those he's left behind. In Charles Edwards' production (read my review here) the dead king hovers over proceedings like a shadow. Bychkov's intense, impassioned conducting suggests the psychic havoc the king must have unleashed in his time. Perhaps the savage, pathological genes Elektra and Orestes carry came from him  Their lust for revenge goes far beyond filial love. Maybe Clytemnestra killed him because he wasn't a nice man.

Add caption

Soon after Elektra starts singing, the "dance" theme  bursts out. Dance in this case is a form of madness. Bychkov conducted the circular rhythms so we could feel the obsessiveness percolate. Savage climaxes, the strings screaming and stabbing. The axe lies buried underground but "sings" through the orchestra. Strauss builds maniacal laughter into his music, and  even  the unearthly bright stare some schizophrenics exhibit. Woodwinds played sensually but with morbid undertones. Bychkov's ear for detail is musically informed but also psychologically true. Someone complained that the ROH production wasn't "palatial" or elegant. But for Strauss, and for Bychkov, this palace is a prison of the soul. Andris Nelsons was brilliant at Covent Garden last year, but Bychkov works with the dynamic of the Royal Albert Hall to bring out subtleties often missed, like the parody of waltz and "family values". In the final dance, Bychkov highlights the percussion,  with its intimations of the organized violence of a military society where women like Elektra (or Clytemnestra) can't act other than through men.The lushness of this instrumentation is deceptive. Like the palace, it's poisoned. The savage last chords made me think of Wozzeck.

Christine Goerke has created so many Elektras in recent years that she probably owns the part these days. Her voice is richly resonant, shading into mezzo territory, which allows a remarkable range of emotional expressiveness. Elektra's a killer part, forcing the voice up to the extremes, torturing technique, but Goerke delivers. She's not afraid to let the role dictate the way she sings. When she recognizes Orestes, her voice rises to near-scream, then softens into tenderness. How long it must have been since Elektra felt safe enough to feel human kindness, Goerke's voice warms yet still carries memories of pain.  Through Goerke, we glimpse what Elektra might have been. At the Royal Albert Hall, Goerke displayed a new dimension to her artistry. She wasn't giving an "opera house" performance but enacting the role in such a way that she filled the massive auditorium, not with amplified voice but with amplified personality. Truly remarkable: in all these years of Promming, I can't remember any singer taking control of the RAH like this. She made an impact that felt strikingly personal, up close and human, as if the distance her voice carried meant nothing, and we were one-to-one with Elektra in her isolation.

This warmth in Goerke's voice was paralleled by Gun-Brit Barkmin's Chrysothemis. Little sister wants marriage and babies, not death   Yet the firmness in Barkmin';s timbre, and the assertive confidence in her delivery  brings out the underlying strength in the role. We need to hear more from Barkmin. ROH take note! Chrysothemis is no Barbie Doll image of womanhood. Although Justin Wray is creditted as stage director, there wasn't any evidence of directing (other than use of lighting) until the final scene when Goerke and Barkmin embraced each other. Subtle, but significant.

Much-loved Dame Felicity Palmer sang Clytemnestra, receiving much applause. Although her voice is beginning to show its edges, Palmer's experience in the role paid dividends. When she sang about her fears, she made the chaaracter sympathetic. Cold-blooded killers don't fear bad dreams or, for that matter, fall for toy boys.  Johan Reuter sang Orestes, with Robert Künzli as Aegisthus. Katarina Bradić , Zoryana Kushpler, Hanna Hipp, Marie-Eve Munger, Iris Kupke, Miranda Keys as the maids and their overseer, Ivan Turšić as a young servant  and Jongmin Park as Orestes' tutor completed a fine line-up.

Strauss Elektra Prom 59 - part ONE, part 2 follows

My review, as pronised, is HERE.  Richard Strauss Elektra, BBC Prom 53 – an amazing experience!  Semyon Bychkov, Christine Goerke, Felicity Palmer and a cast who could hardly be faulted.  Christine Goerke "is not one of those Elektras who start the opera as demented and raddled. From the opening she projected youth and a certain rapture in the vocal line. Only gradually did you come to realise that this young woman was unhinged. Goerke had a way of smiling to herself which told volumes. What was refreshing about her performance was that, though certainly a very big sing, she did not seem to need to attack every single phrase. There was some profoundly poignant moments and this was one of the most sympathetic Elektras I have heard in a long time."

Please read the full review in Opera Today HERE  I'll be writing too about the experience – for an experience it was! The Royal Albert Hall is a vast cavern, but Goerke filled it  so well that she made Elektra feel close up and personal.  Read my review here.Photo above shows Strauss at the premiere. Note costumes. That Clytemestra's not authentic period  Greek!

Operas we can hear in an opera house anytime, but this was no ordinary performance.  I loved the Royal Opera House production in September 2013 (which I reviewed HERE), and so did just about everyone else. I saw the previous  ones too, but 2013 was by far the best.  Goerke and Andris Nelsons, go figure. When this production is revived again, do not miss it as  it's very intelligent and very passionate, which is perhaps why some didn't get it in 2008.

Strauss Elektra Goerke Broadcast Royal Opera House

Another chance to hear Richard Strauss Elektra from the Royal Opera House : listen here on BBC Radio 3. Christine Goerke, Adrianne Pieczonka, Michaela Schuster and Iain Paterson sing, Andris Nelsons conducts. When this production premiered it was savagely attacked, much in the same way other good productions - and operas -  are met with hostility. One critic even complained that the palace wasn't "regal" enough.  But what's "regal" about regicide, madness and bloodthirsty revenge? Thankfully, five years on, audiences have matured. Tickets sold at a discount on the first night but word of mouth recommendations ensured that they sold out solid by the middle of the run.

This broadcast of Elektra was recorded live at the Royal House in September. Here's what I wrote at the time :

"Richard Strauss Elektra at the Royal Opera House is every bit as explosive as reports indicated.  Audiences are  perfectly capable of appreciating extreme trauma as drama. At last, this intelligent production gets the superlative performances it deserves, suggesting that Elektra should feature more regularly in the ROH repertoire. There's more to opera than tired rehashes of Così, Traviata and Carmen. It takes courage to do Elektra with the intensity it merits. Get to this before the run ends, because it's very powerful. If ROH has the foresight to film this, it will become a cult on DVD.

Andris Nelsons conducted. No mistaking this Strauss for Johann! Nelsons is always dynamic, but Elektra seems to have electrified him.  He relishes the danger of Strauss's most adventurous score, which threatens to break through the bounds of tonality, just as Elektra herself breaks through the bounds of convention. Nelsons stretched the Royal Opera House orchestra, and they responded with unusually idiomatic freedom, almost as though they were a specialist ensemble like the London Sinfonietta.  His tempi are well judged, creating huge surges of tension. It's as if the palace itself were alive, breathing like Elektra herself, a volcano, a force of nature about to erupt. The ghost of Agamemnon hovers oppressively over the drama. The King doesn't need to sing. His "Schatten" looms in the backdrop, and his voice is in the orchestra. Dark bassoons and basses slither, rumbling under the seething strings. Details emerge like brief releases of tension: sour, bitter woodwinds, oscillating like the pan-pipes of mad dancers.

Yet Elektra affects us most emotionally when we identify with her as a human being. Charles Edwards, the director, wanted to avoid the caricature of Elektra as a mad harpie. "A lot of her music is soft, amazingly tender...... Elektra, for all her righteousness, is deeply damaged: everything that's weiblich, human and fertile about her, she’s had to repress, yet she doesn’t hold it against her sister who stands for all she can never have.” In 2008, this was Mark Elder's first Elektra. He overdid the restraint at the expense of drama. This music needs a schizophrenic dynamic between oppressive extreme and fragile vulnerability. Nelsons gets the contrast perfectly. At critical moments the orchestra almost falls silent as singers growl sotto voce. The impact is all the more unsettling.

Christine Goerke is astonishingly good. She projects crescendi at maximum volume without sounding shrill or forced, though that might well be within the character. Goerke's technical control allows her to create Elektra as a fully rounded personality, a normal woman driven to extremes. She terrifies the maids because at least one of them identifies with her. Women are brutalized in societies like this. Goerke's "inner Elektra" is equally impressive. When she sings about Elektra having once been beautiful, Goerke's voice mellows into rich rubato: we can "see"  the young innocent she used to be. Edward's Personenregie is exceptional. Every gesture, every modulation works expressively. When Goerrke sings "Orest! Orest!" , she does so with such Sensucht that you can visualize her "Traumbild".  Nelson's conducting in this section  glowed with wistfulness.

For all we know, Agamemnon was a brute, and Klytemnestra was redressing the balance. Michaela Schuster's Klytemnestra is still young enough to hope for happiness. Schuster's voice is vibrant and sensual, and she moves with energy and litheness. Psychologically, this is perceptive. If Klytemnestra were a desiccated hag, we might not feel the desperation which led her to this cataclysm. The insomnia sequence suggests how deeply conflicted she is. Klytemnestra is strong, but Schuster (very well blocked) was able to suggest that there are savage cracks beneath her surface.

This is one seriously dysfunctional family, but we're drawn to them because they're realisitic. Adrianne Pieczonka sings Chrysothemis with authority, so one feels that the character is mature enough to make choices even if they're not the ones her sister makes. Were it not for Elektra's sacrifice and Orest's courage, Chrysothemis might have become trapped in the same syndrome of denial and revenge turned unhealthily inward.

Iain Patterson sang Orest with enough character to make the role a credible hero. The role isn't massive, but Patterson makes a far stronger impact than some who've done the role. With genes like these, Orest needs to be credible. Again, the direction is good. When Patterson climbs into the castle, hanging onto a rope, it feels, and looks dangerous. When he and Elektra embrace, it feels genuine. "The dogs recognized me": a deft human touch in the libretto, which Patterson sings with warmth. In this revival, there isn't a single role, however minor, that isn't well cast and well directed.

This time round, the staging and direction are even more focused. The revolving door as plot device works extremely well. It's a kind of Tardis, compressing the violence beyond the stage, its movement reflecting the sudden switches of fate in this opera and in its turbulent music. The palace wall looks impenetrable, but the cloth backdrop reminds us that the inner rooms will be breached, and Klytemnestra, for all her power, will die. Debris is strewn over the stage, and bodies, but purposefully. We are "inside" the fractured psyches that inhabit this opera and its insights into human psychology."

photos :  Clive Barda, 2013 Royal Opera House

Explosive Elektra Royal Opera House

Richard Strauss Elektra at the Royal Opera House is every bit as explosive as reports indicated.  Audiences are  perfectly capable of appreciating extreme trauma as drama. At last, this intelligent production gets the superlative performances it deserves, suggesting that Elektra should feature more regularly in the ROH repertoire. There's more to opera than tired rehashes of Così, Traviata and Carmen. It takes courage to do Elektra with the intensity it merits. Get to this before the run ends, because it's very powerful. If ROH has the foresight to film this, it will become a cult on DVD.

Andris Nelsons conducted. No mistaking this Strauss for Johann! Nelsons is always dynamic, but Elektra seems to have electrified him.  He relishes the danger of Strauss's most adventurous score, which threatens to break through the bounds of tonality, just as Elektra herself breaks through the bounds of convention. Nelsons stretched the Royal Opera House orchestra, and they responded with unusually idiomatic freedom, almost as though they were a specialist ensemble like the London Sinfonietta.  His tempi are well judged, creating huge surges of tension. It's as if the palace itself were alive, breathing like Elektra herself, a volcano, a force of nature about to erupt. The ghost of Agamemnon hovers oppressively over the drama. Eletra's father, the king, doesn't need to sing. His "Schatten" looms in the backdrop, and his voice is in the orchestra. Dark bassoons and basses slither, rumbling under the seething strings. Details emerge like brief releases of tension: sour, bitter woodwinds, oscillating like the pan-pipes of mad dancers.

Yet Elektra affects us most emotionally when we identify with her as a human being. Charles Edwards, the director, wanted to avoid the caricature of Elektra as a mad harpie. "A lot of her music is soft, amazingly tender...... Elektra, for all her righteousness, is deeply damaged: everything that's weiblich, human and fertile about her, she’s had to repress, yet she doesn’t hold it against her sister who stands for all she can never have.” In 2008, this was Mark Elder's first Elektra. He overdid the restraint at the expense of drama. This music needs a schizophrenic dynamic between oppressive extreme and fragile vulnerability. Nelsons gets the contrast perfectly. At critical moments the orchestra almost falls silent as singers growl sotto voce. The impact is all the more unsettling.

Christine Goerke is astonishingly good. She projects crescendi at maximum volume without sounding shrill or forced, though that might well be within the character. Goerke's technical control allows her to create Elektra as a fully rounded personality, a normal woman driven to extremes. She terrifies the maids but at least one of them identifies with her. Women are brutalized in societies like this. Goerke's "inner Elektra" is equally impressive. When she sings about Elektra having once been beautiful, Goerke's voice mellows into rich rubato: we can "see"  the young innocent she used to be. Edward's Personenregie is exceptional. Every gesture, every modulation works expressively. When Goerrke sings "Orest! Orest!" , she does so with such Sensucht that you can visualize her "Traumbild".  Nelson's conducting in this section  glowed with wistfulness.

For all we know, Agamemnon was a brute, and Klytemnestra was redressing the balance. Michaela Schuster's Klytemnestra is still young enough to hope for happiness. Schuster's voice is vibrant and sensual, and she moves with energy and litheness. Psychologically, this is perceptive. If Klytemnestra were a desiccated hag, we might not feel the desperation which led her to this cataclysm. The insomnia sequence suggests how deeply conflicted she is. Klytemnestra is strong, but Schuster (very well blocked) was able to suggest that there are savage cracks beneath her surface.

This is one seriously dysfunctional family, but we're drawn to them because they're realisitic. Adrianne Pieczonka sings Chrysothemis with authority, so one feels that the character is mature enough to make choices even if they're not the ones her sister makes. Were it not for Elektra's sacrifice and Orest's courage, Chrysothemis might have become trapped in the same syndrome of denial and revenge turned unhealthily inward.

Iain Patterson sang Orest with enough character to make the role a credible hero. The role isn't massive, but Patterson makes a far stronger impact than some who've done the role. With genes like these, Orest needs to be credible. Again, the direction is good. When Patterson climbs into the castle, hanging onto a rope, it feels, and looks dangerous. When he and Elektra embrace, it feels genuine. "The dogs recognized me": a deft human touch in the libretto, which Patterson sings with warmth. In this revival, there isn't a single role, however minor, that isn't well cast and well directed.

This time round, the staging and direction are even more focused. The revolving door as plot device works extremely well. It's a kind of Tardis, compressing the violence beyond the stage, its movement reflecting the sudden switches of fate in this opera and in its turbulent music. The palace wall looks impenetrable, but the cloth backdrop reminds us that the inner rooms will be breached, and Klytemnestra, for all her power, will die. Debris is strewn over the stage, and bodies, but purposefully. We are "inside" the fractured psyches that inhabit this opera and its insights into human psychology.

photos : copyright Clive Barda, courtesy Royal Opera House

Elektra - Royal Opera House - the director speaks

“Opera directing is very different to theatre directing,” Charles Edwards, director of Elektra at the Royal Opera House, told me in 2008.  “It has to be the music that motivates you.” In this second revival, Andris Nelsons is conducting, which alone almost guarantees an absorbing musical experience. Chrsitine Goerke sings Elektra, with Adrianne Pieczoka as Chrysothemis and Michaela Schuster as Klytemnestra. Rehearsal reports suggest that this will be stunning on all counts. HERE IS MY REVIEW.

“Elektra is a kind of Holy Stück,” Edwards told me. Sir Thomas Beecham conducted it at the Royal Opera House in 1910, a year after it was written, so it carries a venerable performance tradition. But every production is different. “It’s an opera with a fantastic inner logic to it, like Wozzeck, in terms of orchestral and psychological insight…. a kind of psychogram, drawing a picture of what’s happening in the minds of the characters." Citing the sequence where Klytemnestra recounts her traumatic dream, Edwards notes how close Strauss comes to atonality. The music wavers between tones because Klytemnestra can’t find her place emotionally. Strauss was writing well before Schoenberg, and conceptually this is very advanced. It’s as if the composer was on a “cliff edge, looking over into an abyss and pulling back”. Although there are elements of later Strauss in this music, the composer is on dangerous new ground.

Elektra also stands on the precipice in historical terms. This was the Vienna of Freud and artistic innovation. “Hofmannsthal’s libretto isn’t Wagnerian, it’s highly colloquial language, it was daring, yet he didn’t undertake lightly the task of reinterpreting the ancient tragedy in modern, psychological terms.” This was a pivot point in European history: nations tottering on the edge of the First World War, and the end of the Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian empires. Hence costumes which evoke Kaiser and Tsar, and sets which juxtapose ancient Greek ruins and early Bauhaus architecture. “The whole weight of history is pressing down.” It’s significant that the production was first conceived on the brink of the invasion of Iraq. If anything, the five years since the premiere in 2003,  have sharpened the focus. “We cannot ignore the past.” Had Parliament not had the guts to reject the bombing of Syria, we might be at war yet again, today. This Elektra is frighteningly prescient.

 Klytemnestra wants to forget Agamemnon’s murder, but the truth catches up on her. The characters are locked in a cycle of retribution and violence. “Revenge, revenge, revenge,” said Edwards, “it’s been going on since the beginning of mankind.”

“Ich trage die Last des Glückes”, Elektra carries the burden of the past, until she herself dies. Her final dance is not a dance of triumph – she doesn’t die in other versions of the legend, but in Hofmannsthal’s version, she is killed, just like those who killed her father, because she wanted vengeance too much. “That’s what that final C Major chord means,” said Edwards. "It comes suddenly, in contrast to the minor keys that lead up to this point. Strauss is turning a blinding light upon us, This is not celebration, it’s interrogation : Is this what we really want ?” Elektra has been rehearsing her victory for a long time, but when it becomes reality, it finishes her off.

In this production, Edwards wants the music to come through clearly. “This won’t be a total Schlacht of sound, a generalized bloodbath of noise where you can’t really hear the words. The louder the orchestra, the more the singers have to force their voices and that lessens what they can really do.” Of course Elektra can be loud, but this can obscure the deeper levels of meaning. No diva “bathing in vast amounts of decibels”, then?  Edwards wanted to avoid the caricature of Elektra as a mad harpie. "A lot of her music is soft, amazingly tender. The dynamic between Elektra and Chrysothemis is fundamental. Elektra, for all her righteousness, is deeply damaged : everything that's weiblich, human and fertile about her, she’s had to repress, yet she doesn’t hold it against her sister who stands for all she can never have.”

The photo above is a still of a 1913 production of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's original (1903) play.  Notice how un-romantic it is, and how modern! When will those who moan about "non-traditional" stagings learn that stagings were traditionally of their own time? Think about Greek drama - staged in the simplest of surroundings in normal clothing with only masks for fantasy. Decor does not in itself make drama. It's the intelligence behind the staging that makes it work. This Elektra is unnerving, as an opera as disturbing as this should be.

Lyrical Elektra? Gergiev surprises

"Valery Gergiev slows the tempo" goes a headline in the Times, announcing that Gergiev wants to cut down from a hyper-maniac to a merely maniac schedule. Is Gergiev kidding? Even when he's agonizingly horrible, he's never timid.

Strauss's Elektra could bring out the best or worst in Gergiev. What a plot! Murder, vengeance, family dysfunction and more than a hint of kinky sex. Plenty of scope for extreme exaggeration. Yet Strauss leavens the madness with oddly lyrical passages. Elektra sacrifices herself in delirium, but echoes of dance run through the opera like an underground river. They're easily lost beneath the volcano erupting above, but Strauss puts them there for a reason. Pastoral memories? Or perhaps reminders that the rhythm of life doesn't have to be as madly self-destructive as Greek tragedy? (an observation typical of Richard Strauss).

On this first of two performances, at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra, it was surprising how Gergiev focused on Elektra's elusive, lyrical moments. One might have expected him to disregard them in favour of the more obvious Expressionist extremes. Maybe he was out to confound, or even trying to prove he can do watercolour as well as technicolour. Maybe it's even a throwback from the ballets he's conducted. But the main thing is that he was aware that these gentler moments are there for a purpose. When the recording is finally mastered, using both performances, the end result will be interesting.

Although this was a concert performance, Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet extended her vocal portrayal with stylized body spasms, angular and twisted like Elektra's tortured soul. She expressed the spirit of this Elektra, informed as it is by Gergiev's appreciation of the role of dance. This role is an extremely demanding tour-de-force for any singer. If Charbonnet's voice didn't always carry over the large orchestra, that can be overcome when the sound is mixed. In normal opera stagings, there's more distance between singer and orchestra, so Charbonnet was struggling against overwhelming odds.

Also surprising was the way Matthias Goerne created Orestes as a believeable personality. In the opera, Orestes doesn't have all that much to sing, and he's easily eclipsed by the high dramatics around him. He's come back after all, to take revenge. Goerne's few minutes on stage were projected dark, brooding power. With Agamemnom and Clytemnestra for parents and a virago like Elektra for a sister, Orestes is hardly going to be a a wimp. He may be a man of few words, but he's pivotally important. Listen to the orchestration around his part, it's singularly forceful. Murmuring bassoons, eerie harps : foreboding. Orestes emerges from the shadows. It's Orestes, after all, who exacts the bloody revenge Elektra longs for. Goerne is luxury casting for a relatively small role, but the gamble has paid off handsomely: at last an Orestes that matches Elektra in power and intensity! Strauss shoiws us in his music what the libretto doesn't tell us. In the original saga, Orestes is doomed, cursed by the murder he's about to commit, and will end up mad with guilt. Not a happy part.

Angela Denoke was Chrysothemis , suitably well mannered, and Felicity Palmer was a fairly benign Clyemnestra. Ian Storey's Aegisthus had clout. But the group of Russian singers as the maids were very impressive. In fully staged opera performances, the big stars get attention because the action moves round them. In concert performances individual singers get a chance to shine out, even if their roles are minor. Olga Legkova sang the First Maid, a part so small it's often immersed, but she made it distinctive. That's stage presence! Vuyani Mlinde was a Jette Parker Young Artist. Hearing him as Orestes's companion, you know why he's now been taken on by Oper Frankfurt.
Please seee my other posts on Strausss Elektra by labels or HERE and HERE

Intelligent Elektra - Royal Opera House

“This won’t be a total Schlacht of sound” said the director, Charles Edwards, of this production. Instead, it’s a strikingly intelligent interpretation, focusing on the deeper aspects of the drama.

Despite his extensive experience, this is Mark Elder’s first Elektra. He was adamant that the characterization should reflect the music. Elektra’s part is surprisingly tender at times. Twisted by fate, she’s become wild, but beneath the madness still lurks the real woman Elektra might have been. This makes her tragedy all the more poignant. The real drama here doesn’t lie in decibels. Orchestrally, this was superb. Elder understands the inner dynamic of the music, grasping the fine detail sometimes lost in the vast sweep. Harsh, dry percussion punctuates the beating of the maids. They, too, are victims of the brutal regime. The fifth maid, who protests, is destroyed, as Elektra will be. The playing was so well judged that this would have made a superb recording, even without the visuals.

Yet what visuals ! A monstrous Bauhaus monolith is set at an awkward angle against a Greek temple. These architectural fault lines remind us that Elektra is powerful political commentary. Klytemnestra murdered Agamemnon to seize his kingdom, but she can’t enjoy power, her nightmares pursue her. Elektra is duty bound to avenge her father, but she’s irrevocably warped by it, and cannot live past retribution. As for Orestes, who will now be king ? Neither Strauss nor von Hofmannsthal make this explicit in the opera, but they knew, and their audiences knew, Orestes continues to be punished by the Gods. This production was conceived at the start of the Iraq war although it references that turning point in European history, just before the collapse of the Austrian, German and Russian empires. If anything, recent events like the failure of the banking system, reinforce the point that power is an illusion, easily destroyed. Nothing’s stable : Aegisth whirls round, dying, in a revolving door.

In this palace, family values are dysfunctional. There are disturbing sexual undercurrents in all relationships. Perceptively, however this production doesn’t play up the kinkiness, but places it firmly in the context of the power crazed society around the palace. Everyone is trapped in this brutal situation. Hence the production accentuates the importance of the maids and subsidiary characters, expanding them as silent roles.

Susan Bullock as Elektra is outstanding. Because this interpretation makes her sympathetic, Bullock can develop the more subtle aspects of Elektra’s personality. She’s no screaming mad harpie. There are many traces of the woman she might have become. She mocks the maids for having children, yet understands why Chrysothemis wants babies. The dynamic between Elektra and Chrysothemis (beautifully realized by Anne Schwanewilms), is lucidly defined. “Ich kann nicht sitzen und ins Dunkel starren wie du “, cries Chrysothemis. It helps explain why, at her moment of triumph, Elektra deflates. She has nothing to sustain her but vengeance and must die when she achieves it. Her final dance is slow, barely perceptible, as if she’s sinking into the very ground, carrying the “burden of happiness” which no longer has meaning.

Orestes is the finest part I've seen Johan Reuter play so far, and it suits him well. So much more can be made of Klytemnestra and Aegisth than Jane Henschel and Frank van Aken presented, but in theatrical terms this was no real loss, as it didn’t pull focus away from the sisters and Orestes, and the wider drama around them. Indeed, they, too, are created by the insane world around them, rather than sources of evil. Rarely does lighting merit a mention, but this time it was exceptionally effective. Agamemnon features prominently as a silent role, his “ghost” projected onto the walls of his palace. When Elektra sings to Orestes of “Der milchige des Monds”, a faint, but persistent light shines on the corrugated panoply above her. It’s a tiny detail, easily missed, but that moment of beauty throws the tragedy into high relief. This Elektra becomes more profoundly moving, the more it unfolds.

Pix of production here :
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2008/11/a_powerful_poig.php

ROH Elektra - the Director speaks

“Opera directing is very different to theatre directing”, says Charles Edwards, director of Elektra at the Royal Opera House this season. “It has to be the music that motivates you”. For this production, he works with Mark Elder, “an extraordinarily theatrically-minded conductor who sees theatre in everything he hears”.

“Elektra is a kind of Holy Stück”, he adds. Sir Thomas Beecham conducted it at the Royal Opera House in 1910, a year after it was written, so it carries a venerable performance tradition. But every production is different. “It’s an opera with a fantastic inner logic to it, like Wozzeck, in terms of orchestral and psychological insight…. a kind of psychogram, drawing a picture of what’s happening in the minds of the characters." Citing the sequence where Klytemnestra recounts her traumatic dream, Edwards notes how close Strauss comes to atonality. The music wavers between tones because Klytemnestra can’t find her place emotionally. Strauss was writing well before Schoenberg, and conceptually this is very advanced. It’s as if the composer was on a “cliff edge, looking over into an abyss and pulling back”. Although there are elements of later Strauss in this music, the composer is on dangerous new ground.

Elektra also stands on the precipice in historic terms. This was the Vienna of Freud and artistic innovation. “Hofmannsthal’s libretto isn’t Wagnerian, it’s highly colloquial language, it was daring, yet he didn’t undertake lightly the task of reinterpreting the ancient tragedy in modern, psychological terms.” This was a pivot point in European history, nations tottering on the edge of the First World War, and the end of the Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian empires. Hence costumes which evoke Kaiser and Tsar, and sets which juxtapose ancient Greek ruins and early Bauhaus architecture. “The whole weight of history is pressing down.” It’s significant that the production was first conceived on the brink of the invasion of Iraq. If anything, the last five years have sharpened the focus. “We cannot ignore the past.” Klytemnestra wants to forget Agamemnon’s murder, but the truth catches up on her. The characters are locked in a cycle of retribution and violence. “Revenge, revenge, revenge,” says Edwards, “it’s been going on since the beginning of mankind.”

“Ich trage die Last des Glückes”, Elektra carries the burden of the past, until she herself dies. Her final dance is not a dance of triumph – she doesn’t die in other versions of the legend, but in Hofmannsthal’s version, she is killed, just like those who killed her father, because she wanted vengeance too much. “That’s what that final C Major chord means,” says Edwards. As Mark Elder pointed out, it comes suddenly, in contrast to the minor keys that lead up to this point. “Strauss is turning a blinding light upon us,” says Edwards. “This is not celebration, it’s interrogation : Is this what we really want ?” Elektra has been rehearsing her victory for a long time, but when it becomes reality, it finishes her off.

In this production, Edwards wants the music to come through clearly. “This won’t be a total Schlacht of sound, a generalised bloodbath of noise where you can’t really hear the words. The louder the orchestra, the more the singers have to force their voices and that lessens what they can really do.” Of course Elektra can be loud, but this can obscure the deeper levels of meaning. No diva “bathing in vast amounts of decibels”, then ? “Mark Elder knew absolutely that he wanted to avoid the caricature of Elektra as a mad harpie. A lot of her music is soft, amazingly tender. The dynamic between Elektra and Chrysothemis is fundamental. Elektra, for all her righteousness, is deeply damaged : everything that weiblich, human and fertile about her, she’s had to repress, yet she doesn’t hold it against her sister who stands for all she can never have.”

That’s why Edwards is so thrilled about Susan Bullock who will be this Elektra. “She understood, instinctively, she has an astonishing theatrical imagination. She is the greatest English singing actress in this role in the world.” Many who have heard Bullock will agree. Although she has created the part more than 50 times, she comes to the production with an open mind, eager to develop. Her experience counts. “Because of the physical requirements of opera, singers, like dancers, absolutely have to get the character ‘into their bodies’ and grow with it flexibly.”

Bullock’s approach to Elektra determines this characterization of Chrysothermis. “Nagellack”, a conductor once told Edwards, was the essence of the part, as if she had to be some hardened Jean Harlow vamp. “I don’t think Chrysothemis ever puts nail polish on,” he says, however. She’s the one who believes in babies and intimacy. “She’s as strong as Elektra but more rational. Elektra has this hallucinogenic monologue where she’s fantasizing about revenge, and Chrysothemis comes in quietly and warns her that the immediate problem pressing on her is that their mother wants to lock her up." Anne Schwanewilms will be singing the role.

Chrysothemis is pure, but Elektra has been corrupted, along the way, and not simply by her father’s death. Has Aegisth abused her ? His hold over Klytemnestra is sexual, but this production shows that her body has collapsed, while he is still “this priapic power-crazed individual who satisfies himself wherever he can”. That’s why the maids are pregnant ! Aegisth doesn’t think beyond the moment any more than Klytemnestra can think of the past. There’s an unhealthy power struggle between Aegisth and Elektra. “We’re playing this as a kind of sex game, as she can be quite dominating as she has some kind of power over him. Maybe she can tell her mother he’s fiddling with her ? there’s mileage in that. There’s no way out for Elektra, no sexual release or outflow. It comes from a poisoned place because she’s had to stifle all the natural warmth and sexual maturity she should have been able to grow into.” We can imagine Freudian things now that Hofmannsthal would not have dared express a hundred years ago. Here, even Orestes isn’t “some proto Wotan hero, but traumatised”.

“If only I could erase the word ‘revival’ from the operatic lexicon !” says Edwards. “The word Weideraufnahme, a 'new take', is more appropriate. Five years have passed, and if anything, the interpretation takes on extra significance now that all that’s safe and certain seems to be crumbling around us." Edwards credits his cast, who have melded well. The family in the plot may be dysfunctional, but the singers work together like a community. “It’s much more ensemble. Everyone’s on stage at the end, the whole piece is cyclical. Toscanini said there is no such thing as small parts, only small artists and there are no small artists in this production. Everyone is going on a journey, all their roles figure.”

This Elektra is on at the Royal Opera House, London on November 8th, 12th, 15th, 18th, 21st, 24th. See the original article with photo at
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2008/11/elektra_at_roya.php