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FEATURE: LETTER FROM NEW YORK
March 23, 2004
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By Allan Ulrich
Bay Area operaphiles who lament the age of the tyrannical director will find little comfort in a visit to the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Richard Strauss' Salome. Despite Karita Mattila's incendiary interpretation of the Judean princess, it makes theatrical and musical hash out of the durable one-act shocker.
The purveyor of needless innovation is the German director Jürgen Flimm, whose updating of Fidelio four years ago — one of this company's periodic gestures toward modernism — divided opinion among the Met faithful. In this latest attempt, Salome is still set in the Middle East, but the era of the production, judging from Santo Loquasto's decor, is the 1930s. A crumbling pavilion with tiled wall at stage right serves for Herod's palace. On the left, stylized sand dunes, in the manner of a Georgia O'Keefe painting, suggest the Palestine desert. The cistern in which Jochanaan (John the Baptist) has been imprisoned has metamorphosed into a mine shaft you might expect to find in a production of La fanciulla del west; the prophet travels to the surface via elevator — which is not, I believe, what the bible means by ascension.
We're in Evelyn Waugh land, last outpost of civilization, and all that, where smart young things cavort in tuxedos and, in Salome's case, white satin dresses with plunging necklines. Soldiers in puttees stand guard, bullet belts flung across their chests. None of this temporal dislocation would have been fatal if Flimm had not tossed in extraneous details, meanwhile ignoring the crucial elements in the score. Every time Jochanaan or a severed portion of his anatomy appears, angels in black robes and white wings mill on a hillside, a distracting and maladroit gesture, given the banality of Strauss's writing for the prophet. But, then, Flimm ignores the references in the libretto (Oscar Wilde's French, in Hedwig Lachmann's German translation) to the moon, a crucial symbol in the opera.
Most important, Flimm's Salome is no longer an innocent, 16-year old who is sexually awakened by the prophet, but a jaded, high-class floozy who guzzles from champagne bottles and, during the Doug Varone-choreographed dance, dons and sheds what looks like the entire contents of a Victoria's Secret catalog, displaying considerably more flesh than customarily seen on the Met's stage, even during the ballet season. Fortunately, Mattila also sings. If Salome (this was the singer's American debut in this assignment) finds her lower range dry and approximate, in the climactic monologue, she stills soars over the Straussian orchestra, the tone retaining its warmth and roundedness. The Finnish soprano might have located more individuality in the libretto, and, at the opening, she paced herself cannily in the earlier part of the performance; but given Flimm's eccentricities, Mattila was an impressive addition to the list of contemporary interpreters, which has never been large. Replacing the ailing Siegfried Jerusalem at the March 15 premiere, baritone-turned-tenor Allan Glassman lent Herod a kind of sleazy resignation, inflecting the text with uncommon clarity. Perhaps intimidated by Loquasto's bad-taste costuming, Russian mezzo-soprano Larisa Diadkova sulked her way through Herodias. In his Met debut, the German baritone Albert Dohmen informed Jochanaan with a sonorous instrument (made more so through amplification in the cistern). Tenor Matthew Polenzani brought his typical sweetness to the fatally smitten captain Narraboth.
It has been evident for some time at the Met that principal guest conductor Valery Gergiev's affinity for the non-Slavic repertoire is less than consistent. In his first outing with this composer in New York, the Maryinsky's artistic director proved a pallid Straussian. Arresting details were etched with fair acuity, yet when one sought tension coiling ever tighter or an overall arc to Strauss's design, they did not emerge. Mattila's revealing dance could not disguise the fact that whatever sensuality one encountered was not coming from the Met pit. Performances of Salome run through April 10. The Met's revival of Rossini's opera buffa, L'Italiana in Algeri, however, is now history, and a happy chapter, at that. A surprise midwinter hit for a company that has, reportedly, witnessed more than one half-empty house this season, the reasons for the success may be laid at the feet of Russian mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina, Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez and, not least, artistic director James Levine, who has not previously exhibited much interest in the bel canto repertoire. Intimacy does not figure in the late Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's still serviceable production (recreated by David Kneuss), with its cream-hued unit set and changing tableaux at the rear. And it certainly did not figure in the performers' broad manner and robust vocalism, which reached out and enveloped the 3,800-seat auditorium. Borodina has been faulted by some observers who expect their Rossini comic heroines to cavort like Carol Burnett. Yet, if this Isabella does not scintillate, she certainly glows with fervor so outsized that it assumes winning comic dimensions. You know who will wear the trousers in the family, once she extricates her Lindoro from the clutches of the Mustafà. In addition, Borodina would appear to possess a mean upper cut, which, at one point, she deploys to disable her captor. Isabella's formidable scena, “Cruda sorte,” achieved the ideal blend of gravity and self-parody here. Borodina may not wield the lithe mezzo-coloratura that prevails today. Yet her ruby-colored instrument delivers every note and every run of the demanding passagework with enormous zest. San Franciscans will rediscover Borodina in this repertoire when she opens the 2005 San Francisco Opera season in this opera.
From his entrance aria, “Languir per una bella,” Flórez asserted his primacy in this repertoire on today's international stage; with an infinitely flexible, lyric tenor, a canny recourse to dynamics and a lovably guileless manner, this is the Lindoro for our time. The cast also included soprano Lyubov Petrova's bright Elvira, baritone Mariusz Kwiecien's rugged Haly, baritone Earle Patriarco's fussy Taddeo and bass Ildar Abdrazakov's blustery Mustafà, all entering into the spirit of the affair. Levine lavished a sly, sinuous reading of the score on his cast, breathing with them and keeping it all tight during the great onomatopoeic ensemble that concludes the first act. Under the conductor who shaped its identity, the Met Orchestra, which sounded a bit lax under Gergiev two nights earlier, performed with poise and precision.
(Allan Ulrich covered music for the San Francisco Examiner and later for San Francisco Chronicle for a total of 22 years. He is the Northern California correspondent for Opera)
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Olga Borodina (Isabella)