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May 8, 2009
Full of raw emotions
Salome a highlight of the city's Opera season.
DANA SCHLANGER
A short time before his father's death, composer Richard Strauss played for him excerpts from the nearly completed score of Salome. The old man's reaction is now part of history: "Oh God, what nervous music!" he said. Indeed, the opera Salome is rife with extreme psychology, where all the nerves are raw and exposed.
The Vancouver Opera production of Salome succeeds at walking the fine line between "electrified" and "electrocuted." From the first moment, the mood is unnerving, with a silent scene unfolding on the slanted, gaping set defined by long blue shadows. You don't applaud for the conductor coming in, there's no "official" beginning of the show – you just gradually start paying attention to the moving figures on stage, until the quiet theatre allows the music to slither in. And when it does, there's no going back – it throws you almost instantly into the expressionistic, vivid world of obsessive characters and extreme emotional range. The orchestra, conducted by music director Jonathan Darlington, was outstanding in one of the most difficult pieces in the repertoire: it weaves a complex, opulent tapestry of sound together with the singers and never fades into the background.
Salome is a daunting and rewarding part for any singer and Russian soprano Mlada Khudoley took it on with great aplomb. The part covers a huge range, which she sometimes has to cross at great speed and in one breath, between the abyss of the almost animal groaning stemming from anger and rejection, to the soaring, lyrical flow of her love song to dead Jokanaan. It took a little while until Khudoley merged with the character, but it happened as soon as she had to portray the extreme, raw emotions, swaying between love, lust and blind rage. Her portrayal was most powerful in Salome's nervous, angular melodic lines – the singer can't even expect the audience's enthusiastic response to her arias, since there are no arias! The "Dance of the Seven Veils," which often represents an important attraction, was played down and somewhat a letdown. However, Khudoley flourished in the final scene, the musical and emotional climax of the work. It is preceded by a terrible pent-up tension when Salome tries to picture the beheading that is taking place. It is the part where we see her gradually, but completely, lose her mind in front of our eyes and ears. Khudoley shone in this extremely emotional, yet extremely singable, tour de force and closed the opera with glowing colors.
American bass-baritone Greer Grimsley (who wowed Vancouver in Verdi's Macbeth in 2006) is Jokanaan, the stern (but good-looking) prophet who meets a grim fate. Grimsley's Jokanaan is very much alive and in pain – the solemnity of his utterances is warmed up in the performance in which you can sense the zeal and anger. He's a powerful counterpart to the teenage temptress, not an image nor a symbol, but a real man.
As well, John MacMaster is an impressive Herod, resisting the tendency of some singers to turn the tetrarch (ruler of the land) into a cartoonish, lecherous, superstitious man – his fears and impulses seem genuine; he is a weak man, torn between his towering, bitter wife (played larger than life by mezzo-soprano Judith Forst) and the teenage princess who feels revulsion, but plays him like a violin for her own purposes. Young singer Sean Panikkar, who opens the opera as Narraboth, has an excellent voice and a striking stage presence.
There is one more performance of Salome, the high point of the Vancouver Opera season, on May 9.
Dana Schlanger is a Vancouver freelance writer and director of the Dena Wosk School of Performing Arts at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.
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