Thrills amid the gore

Elektra
Royal Opera House

For You
Linbury Studio

The revival at the Royal Opera of Strauss’s Elektra in the production by Charles Edwards, who is also responsible for the sets and lighting, is so drastically modified from 2003 as to amount to a fresh start on the piece. It is still modernised, set in a 20th-century no man’s city, with a crumbling classical wall and a dislocated revolving door, the latter perhaps suggestive of a Viennese coffee house. Given Strauss’s sophisticated primitivism combined with snatches of schmaltzy waltzes and other pre-echoes of Der Rosenkavalier, there may be some justification for uprooting the drama from its moorings in time and place, but the result is confusing. There does come a point, now very familiar to frequenters of Ring productions, when ‘postmodern’ stagings in which characters from myth are domesticated and blatant discrepancies between text and action are indulged, where we are no longer stimulated into thinking anew about established masterworks, but left merely with a jumble of impressions and a damper on serious responding and thinking. The characters are too alienated to engage or move us, and our most positive response is likely to be to the standard of the performance, rather than to the work which it is a performance of, which has disappeared under layers of directorial largesse.

That is certainly the case with this revival. Mark Elder conducted this dense score more impressively than anyone else I have heard in the theatre, and on disc only Mitropoulos has shown such a comprehensive grasp. Elder is prepared to take much of the music slower than usual, in the interests of textural clarity, while at the same time keeping the dynamic level low until the ecstatic ‘Orest!’, when he unleashes an amazing, thrilling volume of sound from an orchestra which plays better for him than for anyone else.