by Antonio Pappano Never Conducted Salome While Was Music Director at Covent Garden, But He Has Now Turned to Strauss for the Final Concerts of his Opening Season with the London Symphony Orchestra, Assembling, One of the Finest Casts You Could Ever Hope to Hear in the Work, and Presenting US with interpretation at Once Decadent, Beautiful, Engulfing, and Frankly Little Short of Astonishing.
Gabriel Fauré once called the score as a “symphonic poem with added voices”, which is not a completely precise description due to the strength and psychological insight of Strauss’, emphasizes the centrality of the role of the orchestra in carrying the dramatic and emotional intensity. With the enormous form, Pappano lets the music in a single unbroken arch of collecting tensions from the glossy, greasy clarinet solo, with which it opens up for the wildness of the end and every flickering of details and color in Strauss’ orchestration hits at home. Saites sound noticeably sensual, wooden flap through exquisite and nervous, the brass, which is infinitely associated with Jochanaan, because it penetrates the prevailing mood of feverish eroticism. The overall effect is of great beauty that is slowly monstrous, obscene and lazy with decay.
It is sung with remarkable and consistent poetry, which avoids the expressionist use, which we sometimes find, and all the more powerful. The concerts finally allow us to hear Asmik Grigorian in the title role, a career assumption when she sang it in Salzburg for the first time in 2018, which she has not yet performed in Great Britain. The mixture of metal and silk in their sound enables her to rise comfortably and delightfully through Strauss’ orchestra in her creeds to Michael Volle’s Jochanaan as well as in her explanations of the final scene. Elsewhere, the darkness in its lower registers conveys nerve -wracking circles, stale determination and companion. It is constantly convincing.
In the meantime, the fanaticism that lurks behind Jochana’s basic dignity is excellent, and is great in his evocation of Christ, who preach his disciples on Lake Galilee, and wildly while cursing himself on Salome. Wolfgang-Ablinger-Sperghacke makes an appropriate neurotic herod: Vapid, weakly willful, fatal dangerous, hardly the veneer of elegance he tries to preserve from dinner. His Herodien are Violeta Urmana, violent in her contempt and in her irony, namely brutal. John Findon sounds passionate, even heroic like Narraboth, his voice greater than many that we usually hear in the role, while Niamh O’Sullivan is eloquent and is deeply touching like the side.
An outstanding, overwhelming performance, every second of it and one of the greatest performance of Salome that I have ever heard.
• In Barbican, London, on July 13th
