Leipzig and Dresden are both staging Elektra. Which city wins?

Yet more performances of Elektra, Richard Strauss’s setting of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ramped-up, neurosis-riddled 1903 reworking of Sophocles, are unlikely to force any anniversary-year reassessments of the composer. But the piece’s current ubiquity does reflect the fact that we’re now relatively well off for singers equipped to tackle the fearsome title role. At their head, arguably, stands the German soprano Evelyn Herlitzius. She’s yet to make her Covent Garden debut, inexplicably, but her riveting performance galvanised the opening night of the first high-profile new production of the work in 2014, at Dresden’s Semperoper, where it shocked and awed its first audience 105 years ago. Re-opened in 1985, the reconstructed theatre boasts a glorious acoustic and one of Germany’s classiest old orchestras, the Staatskapelle, with Christian Thielemann, in charge. More or less concurrently, Peter Konwitschny’s 2005 production, first seen in Copenhagen, was being revived down the road in Leipzig. And while that city’s 1950s opera house can’t match Dresden’s for historic aura, it’s appealingly airy and business-like and features the no less wonderful Gewandhaus Orchestra in its pit. This quirk of programming made it possible to see two Elektras on two consecutive days: not the cheeriest way of spending a January weekend, perhaps, but instructive nonetheless. Dresden assembled a luxurious all-German array of principals around Herlitzius. René Pape was an implacable, richly sung Orest; Anne Schwanewilms’s Chrysothemis was bright and brittle, but infuriatingly blank. Waltraud Meier was characteristically authoritative, but underplayed Klytämnestra. The other roles were strongly taken. The director, Barbara Frey, was something of an odd one out in being Swiss, and a relative newcomer to opera. But none of that explained how she could have had quite so little to say about the piece. The single set (designed by Muriel Gerstner) presented a grand, wood-panelled room, half-built and apparently alluding, according to clued-up local critics, to Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, opened in the 1920s but expanded by the Nazis.