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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Teenage kicks

Robin Holloway on a radio braodcast of Salome

First and last, the orchestra. Even Klimt pales in proximity to the effortless virtuosity, unstinting lavishness, prodigality of colour, in this tour de force of art-nouveau decoration. In the theatre confined to the pit, the sound is liberated on the concert stage to expand in all its powerful, proliferating detail. I’ve never before heard so much that the eye sees, following the score — the glare and dazzle Fauré, reviewing an early Paris production, found as exhausting to the visual as to the aural sense. Under Gianandrea Noseda the BBC Phil gave its all: whether minimal — like the celebrated passage for solo double-bass pinching on a single excruciating repeated high note while the heroine, and all Herod’s court, await the executioner’s bloody upshot — or, more frequent, maximal, as in the score’s greatest passage, the exclamatory ecstasy shortly after, when the Baptist’s severed head is at last in her possession.

It’s difficult for such moments to fail. The Dance of the Seven Veils is a different matter. Here the balance of inspiration and routine, charged ardour and weary kitsch, is perilous. The Dance’s reputation has been dubious from the start, since it became known that Strauss left its composition till last, and threw it off in haste. Even the most convinced admirers of Salome’s body often dismiss her Dance with regretful contempt. I’ve always seen/heard it to be exactly the right thing: doing a specific job with high precision; and providing moreover in its broad phrasing and explicit tunefulness a welcome respite from the breathlessness of its surroundings, which till the equally needed slowing-down for the closing scene rush past, hallucinatory and telegrammatic, as hard to catch as to espy a moving tiger amid its natural camouflage. Under Noseda there was no problem: he ensured the Dance’s consistency with its total context, paced the entirety around its crucial wordless action, and threw taste to the winds by sheer musicianship.

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