(Blog thoughts, not edited report)
Richard Strauss was a respected conductor and composer, adored his family and famous for ecstatic love songs, but something in him knew from depravity. His one-act operas, starting with "Salome," are as visceral and sordid as anything in the repertory.
Last Wednesday the Boston Symphony Orchestra brought a glorious concert staging of “Elektra” to Carnegie Hall, with some of the most beautiful singing ever. Christine Goerke is a phe-nom--best Elektra of all. Her name is made. Engraved.
The 1909 opera looks at one of Greek mythology’s more dysfunctional families. With passion and incisive brilliance, Goerke, onstage every minute, led a powerhouse cast, which entered and exited through the orchestra, had it memorized and acted their parts.
Elektra, the title character whose mother, Klytemnestra, has taken a lover, Aegisth, and killed her husband, Agamemnon, is more than half mad with grief for her father. She pines for the return of Orest, her long-absent brother, to similarly dispatch their mother and Agisth, so she can dance on her father’s grave. If the final massacre had been staged, survivors would have been sloshing on a floor of bloody corpses.
Music director Andris Nelsons, serpentine in his movements, was trimmer and more effective than I’ve seen him, benefitting the singers and huge roiling orchestra. Low brass crawled repulsively and oboes squealed, supported by the hall’s renowned acoustics.
The German soprano Gun-Brit Barkmin as the desperate sister, Chrisothemis, in flapper-like strings of pearls, held her own with Goerke in rapturous duets like those in the luscious “Rosenkavalier” which came two years later.
As the evil Klytamnestra, mezzo Jane Henschel was also good but more of a grandma type, with some imperfectly placed high notes. I found myself thinking that Anna Russell--God forgive me--would have had a picnic with this role. Gerhard Siegel, a Mime at the Met, was a vigorous Aegisth, and James Rutherford a big rolling voice as Orest. Members of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang from the balcony.
Peripheral cavils: “How can you bear to look at me?” doesn’t work with Elektra in concert dress--bright red low-cut evening gown and sparkly earrings. (I don’t know how that’s solved.) But swigging water from a bottle, well, she might have slipped offstage for a second during someone else’s passage, to a glass proffered at the door.
The standing ovation went on for almost 15 minutes. Exciting, and earned.