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Tuesday 2 December 2008

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Teenage kicks

Robin Holloway

Wednesday, 20th February 2008

Robin Holloway on a radio braodcast of Salome

Singing was variable. The heroine of my schoolboy LP was so unmemorable that I’ve forgotten her name: the Salome of the broadcast, though she can be named (Nicola Beller Carbone), was just as colourless (and suffered a longish stretch of misalignment in the final scene). I missed the ‘16-year-old’ quality — the girlish vocal caresses, the light gliding touch, the minx, the coquette, the paradoxical innocence of this wholly knowing creature — equally with ‘the Isolde voice’ able to surmount the surging tumescence of the huge climactic moments (these stipulations for the role are Strauss’s own). But the Herod of Peter Bronder was magnificent, fully a match for unforgotten/unforgettable Julius Patzak of yore: praise can go no higher.

Other singers, all cameo-parts save for the Baptist himself, were OK. But, last as first, the glory was in the orchestra. Here Salome survives, and quells reservation. Her shock value is passé, her pretensions to spiritual and psychological depth risible: but one will never get to the bottom of this amazing tissue of animally-living sonority. It is so paramount and overwhelming as to drown out shallowness of content in every other parameter. It is itself the content, redeeming threadbare patchwork into rich cloth of purple and scarlet; transmuting paste into emerald and sapphire; forging base lead into real silver and gold.

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