RSS

Contact us

Friday 9 January 2009

Thrilled by Strauss

Salome
Bridgewater Hall

Peter Grimes
Nottingham

Die Zauberflöte
Royal Opera House

Does Richard Strauss’s Salome still have the power to shock, as the writers of programme notes like to claim? Not, anyway, in a concert performance, such as was given in the Bridgewater Hall last Saturday, the BBC Philharmonic on unusual territory, with soloists from the production that will soon be seen at the Teatro Regio, Turin. The uniting factor was the conductor, Gianandrea Noseda. Though not shocking, the performance was thrilling, mainly owing to the orchestral playing and Noseda’s brilliant shaping of the score, so that what can often seem, even when staged, a long and often rather tedious prelude to the sensational last quarter-hour was alive at every minute, with a tension maintained even through the uproar of the quarrelsome Jewish theologians and the absurd kitsch of the Dance of the Seven Veils. Noseda commands his forces with the grandest gestures, frequently leaping in the air while imperiously summoning the brass, or crouching below the music stand in order to turn a creepy pianissimo into a stampeding climax. The orchestra clearly revelled in their chance to indulge themselves at such length in Strauss’s exhaustive catalogue of decadent effects, and any set of soloists would have been delighted to work with them.

This set of soloists, however, admirable performers as they are, may have felt that they were obbligati to a stunning concerto for orchestra. Noseda didn’t show much sympathy for them during the many deafening stretches, and the admirable artist Dagmar Peckova could more easily be seen gesturing ferociously than singing the role of Herodias, of which only a small proportion of notes reached me. Strauss is more merciful, for once, to his tenor, and Peter Bronder gave a great account of the neurasthenic (one has to use the word somewhere in a review of Salome) Herod, and gained the biggest applause at the end. This may have been a bit unfair to Nicola Beller Carbone in the title role. Her voice is a size too small for the part, and she was sometimes inaudible, but she purveyed the right kittenish temperament, the adolescent whimsy and casual ferocity of Salome, and she rose grandly to the climax, after the orchestra had had its phenomenal spasm as Jokanaan’s head was lifted from the cistern for her to fulfil herself with, or on. One imagines that in the theatre, with an orchestra on less manifestly exuberant form, the impact of the grotesque drama will be much greater; but it was not only exciting to hear so much detail, it also refuted a long-held view of mine that Strauss over-orchestrates here: it turns out that the more notes of this score you can hear, the more alluring, or fascinating, it becomes. The concert will have been broadcast by the time this notice appears, and I’ll be interested to see whether the BBC’s engineers can manage what no performance in the flesh can, and give us the best of both orchestral and vocal worlds.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved