Alemania
A Question of Momentum
Jesse Simon
Recent instalments of the Berlin
Philharmonic’s Easter Festival in Baden Baden have featured a high-profile
opera performance as its centrepiece; and for those of us unable to leave
Berlin over the Easter weekend, the orchestra has traditionally offered a
subsequent concert performance at the Philharmonie in the week following. Last
year the opera was Die Frau ohne Schatten and this year, continuing on
the theme of unassailable Strauss masterpieces, the audience was treated to a
performance of Elektra featuring Nina Stemme in the title role. With a
strong supporting cast and compelling musical direction from Kirill Petrenko,
the evening was memorable as much for its unbroken tension as for its explosive
outbursts of high drama.
Elektra is
unique among Strauss’ operas precisely for its relentlessness. If Salome
hints at Strauss’ ability to unfold a grand tragedy within a single-act
structure, the ineffectual Herod and his bickering guests nonetheless offer
moments of respite. In Elektra there is no such relief; it’s all
momentum. It builds gradually and inevitably to its great summit – the meeting
of Elektra and Klytämnestra – then allows the story to propel itself towards
its equally inevitable denouément. It is a level of dramatic concentration that
Strauss would never again attempt – even the second act of Die Frau is
followed by an interval to allow the audience to catch their breath – and
the vigour of the score, combined with a story that remains fresh some two and
a half millennia after it was first written down, may explain the opera’s
continued popularity.
The performance on this evening possessed a
strong sense of the work’s dramatic unity and forward thrust. Elektra’s
sequence of one-on-one encounters with Chrysothemis, Klytämnestra, Orest and
Aegisth can lend itself to episodic interpretations, but Mr Petrenko’s reading
– highly focussed and possessed of a momentum to match the score – built
patiently to the climactic moment when Elektra and Klytämnestra part ways, then
guided the succeeding scenes as they gathered in ferocity. Mr Petrenko’s vision
of the tragedy did not, however, translate to overdriven tempi. Indeed the
evening’s finest moments were those in which orchestral control was paired with
an unnervingly measured pace: Elektra’s opening monologue was kept at a simmer,
allowing the drama to emerge as much from the words as from the subtleties of
orchestration. The first appearance of the Agamemnon theme rose slowly to the
surface as though from the bottom of a tar pit, and was all the more effective
for taking its familiar shape so gradually. The quiet tension in Klytämnestra’s
admission of insomnia – a moment of disarming calm in a scene that otherwise
crackled with mutual ill will – was equally compelling, as was the profound
brass and dreamlike tempo that heralded the arrival of Orest.
While much of the action was delineated
with great attention to detail – this was one concert performance in which the
lack of sets and costumes detracted not even remotely from one’s involvement in
the drama – there were a handful of moments, especially in the later scenes, in
which the pursuit of intensity led to a lack of orchestral clarity. The death
of Aegisth and its aftermath never quite found a balance between the exertions
of the orchestra, the acclamations of the offstage choir and the triumphant exclamations
of Chrysothemis, and emerged instead as a barely-controlled chaos. But, as it
often the case with Mr Petrenko’s Strauss performances, the passages of extreme
exhilaration outweighed the handful of undisciplined moments.
At the centre of the evening was Nina
Stemme, an experienced exponent of the role in the opera house, but somehow
even more compelling without the constraints of a full staging. Her opening
‘Allein’, unexpectedly soft and addressed more to herself than the audience,
eased into an opening monologue that was never hurried but full of tension.
Even more than Mr Petrenko, Ms Stemme seemed to be dictating the pace of the
scene, retelling the tale of Agamemnon’s murder with absolute precision.
However it was the scenes with Chrysothemis and Klytämnestra that brought out
the best in Ms Stemme’s performance: if she was less conspicuously wild than
many Elektras there was always dramatic agitation close to the surface, and in
the few moments where she allowed explosive emotion to get the better of
control – her venomous cursing of Chrysothemis or her chilling dismissal of
Klytämnestra – the results were as thrilling as one could hope. It was a
performance that, at the end of the evening, had no difficulty bringing the
normally reluctant Berlin audience to its feet.
Michaela Schuster provided the evening with
a captivating Klytämnestra. Although she approached the performance as though
she were on an opera house stage, her expressive glances and theatrical
gestures only served to enhance a reading of great complexity. The haughtiness
of her initial appearance began to fall away as she confided of her insomnia –
perhaps the quietest and most ominous moment of the evening – and the emotional
ambiguity that emerged in the course of her subsequent dialogue with Elektra
revealed a character forever tortured by the past.
Elza van den Heever was very good at expressing
the plaintive side of Chrysothemis and was able to convey the full frustration
of a reasonably sane person trying to reconcile with a half-mad sister, but her
performance was at its best when it was at its most frantic: her desperate
announcement of Orest’s death and her pleas for Elektra’s help were thrilling
encapsulations of hopelessness. Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke sang a crisp,
well-realised Aegisth, unsympathetic and vaguely cartoonish but never cloyingly
so; and Johan Reuter, despite a few moments in which the subtleties of his
phrasing were overwhelmed by the might of the orchestra, was a sturdy Orest:
his trance-like opening lines, introduced by deeply concentrated brass,
suggested that the mystery guest could just as well have been a figment of
Elektra’s hypercharged imagination.
Mr Petrenko’s recent Strauss performances
with the Berlin Philharmonic – especially last year’s Die Frau and a
frenetic Symphonia Domestic this past February – have tended to mix
passages of the highest possible excitement with frustrating moments of seeming
abandon in which one longs for greater directorial intervention, whether the
gentler sculpting of a particular theme or a tighter rein on the balance
between brass and strings. On this evening the moments of excitement were there
in abundance, but the reservations were far fewer: it may be that in the
relentless momentum of Elektra Mr Petrenko found a score ideally matched
to his own style and sensibilities.
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