Increasingly, we've come to see a kind of hybrid with opera performances at the Proms. Something part way between the static concert performance, everyone static behind a single microphone each, and what is pretty well a full stage performance just with minimalised scenery and props.
The Runnicles/Deutsche Oper Salome for Prom 59 was that kind of hybrid; characters making their exits and entrances; popping up above the bust of Henry Wood in front of the organ console; Herod and his wife gazing on with obvious loathing expressed in their stances at the end from the top of the stairs that run alongside the stalls.
It was in the singers' expressions (if you could see them, of course) that gripped as much as the singing and the playing; the Jews' chorus in animated argument that looked as though it would break into a riot that might go crashing through the Arena at any moment; Nina Stemme, particularly, showing signs of an erotic obsession any teenager might have for a pop idol. . .until you realised it was for a severed head.
I came, in fact (I admit to something of a fancy for Grand Guignol moments, alas) to half-expect that a severed head on a silver platter might actually appear from somewhere, so intense that was; but fortunately no-one was tempted. the intensity and tension by then needing no bathetic stimulus to the imagination.
There is something about Strauss's extraordinary ability to turn eroticism into obsessive, even pathological, sexuality that is really disturbing; and the more so when a conductor and orchestra grasp the nuances of how it is expressed in the music as well as Runnicles and The Deutsche Oper orchestra. Neither sheered away either from risking the aspects of clashing atonalism that I've not really heard so clearly in the texture of the score before.
Runnicles—who conducted like an athlete—created a tension and intensity throughout with great skill, not once lapsing into melodrama, nor once falling into luxuriousness, tempting as it can be to turn Herod's Palace, musically anyway, into a kind of plush and velvet Viennese brothel In fact, despite the large orchestral forces, the score seldom sounded oppressed by them; it was, in many ways, almost sparse.
Especially in Salome's dance; one, for once, not merely of overt profligate sexuality suited to a pole dancer in a 'gentleman's club', but of contradictory erotic insight, experimental sexuality, and the fear of its perversion. The veils —and this is one virtue of a concert performance rather than a stage production—were so much more psychological coverings being stripped away than physical ones.
It was something of a surprise to find that, apparently, Salome is not actually in the Deutsche Oper's recent repertoire. No-one would have guessed it from the orchestra's playing; though one might from some of the singers, either from the scores before them, or their signs of slight weakness in projecting to a full Albert Hall.
I was rather surprised that that applied even to Nina Stemme, from whom I had expected a stronger voice; but then the Albert Hall is difficult at the best of times, more so when you have an orchestra that size just behind you instead of below you in a pit. Samuel Youn—Jokanaan—had some momentary difficulties, but that may have been partly due to misjudging the distance he'd had to run from stage to organ loft: it's a longish way round the back through the corridors . . .
The organ, since it had a spot or two already on it for that purpose, was pressed into service for a pedal note or two, which, quite unexaggerated (quite unlike its use in the War Requiem!) one felt as a sense of unease creeping around the Albert Hall more than a note. . .
It was a little difficult to follow the lyrics (not sure that's quite the right word for this kind of story) from up in the Circle, though that of course, might have been partly due to the cold I somehow acquired at the weekend still muffling my eardrums a little. Not enough, however, not to be able to appreciate this was a stunning, utterly absorbing, performance.
It was a superb reminder that Strauss's musical insight into sexuality is extraordinary. And, even including Rosenkavalier along with Elektra, rather unnerving. Freud—who seems to have been notoriously tone deaf*—with an orchestra instead of a couch, no doubt about it.
*In psycho-analysis, it's termed 'melophobia' (a rather unimaginative and pedestrian coinage, surely; couldn't we have had 'polyhymnophobia'?) and, of course, people have delved into Freud's own neuroses and background in search of reasons. But 'tone-deaf' probably serves as as good an explanation as any.
This is one of the recordings of this season's Proms I shall have to keep. I skipped Elektra. I still haven't quite got over the RoH production (even though it must now be nearly a year back!) and I wasn't sure I could take that kind of searing emotional shock again just yet. Nor, I fear, did I listen to it, having taken to my bed again with hot lemon juice, aspirin and the cough I'd managed to suppress—and as for once, almost everyone else in the RAH did too, which tells you something about the concentration attracted by Prom 59!—during Salome. . .
IPlayer
(Radio 3 repeat not yet scheduled)
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