Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✭✩
by Richard Strauss, directed by Thomas de Mallet Burgess
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
April 21-May 19, 2007
The Canadian Opera Company’s production of Richard’s Strauss’s Elektra (seen April 21, 2007) was an impressive feast for the eyes and ears. The company’s new house, the Four Seasons Centre, allowed the COC Orchestra its first opportunity to play the score with the full complement of 106 musicians that Strauss demands. Under conductor Richard Bradshaw the results were magnificent. The orchestra reveled in Strauss’s lush coloration and in the music’s violence and ecstasy that push chromaticism to its limits. At the curtain call the principals spontaneously applauded the orchestra even before Bradshaw joined them on stage.
Originally directed by John Crosby in 1996, the production was now helmed by Thomas de Mallet Burgess. Derek McLane’s skewed expressionist set presented a courtyard-cum-abattoir focussed on what seemed a garden shed which when opened was lined with gold and represented Klytämnestra’s palace. Silent figures in Anita Stewart’s white Edwardian costumes depicted the family before Agamemnon’s murder and contrasted with the grotesquely costumed servants now dominating Elektra’s world. This place where Elektra and Orest as children may have rehearsed their revenge would become the real locus for their revenge as adults. Thomas C. Hase’s flamboyant lighting enhanced the hallucinatory impression by unexpectedly bathing the courtyard in stark, contrasting colours while lighting the singers to cast enormous shadows.
Susan Bullock, Brünnhilde in the COC’s recent Ring cycle, threw herself into the title role with a fierce, no-holds-barred intensity. Indeed, her singing only grew in security and strength to support her thrillingly convincing portrayal. Ewa Podleś’s Klytämnestra appeared as a monstrous but mortally injured bird of prey. Her huge voice of seemingly immeasurable depth and resonance and her subtly detailed shading of every phrase suited this larger-than-life character so perfectly the feeling gripped the hushed audience that there could perhaps be no finer performance of this role. De Mallet Burgess’s insightful direction made clear the parallel between mother and daughter as two women both fatally consumed by their obsessions. Alwyn Mellor was sometimes strained as Chysothemis and lacked the frisson of Bullock or Podleś.
Compared to such formidable women the men could not compete either vocally or dramatically and made less an impression than Klytämnestra’s terrifying maids led by Overseer Joni Henson. As Orest, Daniel Sutin’s wobbly baritone and wooden acting undermined his character while John Mac Master as Aegisth captured the image of drunken, gourmandizing parvenu, but his hoarse tenor was more to be endured than enjoyed. Yet, these were minor lapses in a brilliant production anchored by two revelatory performances.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera News 2007-05.
Photo: Betty Allison, Susan Bullock and Ewa Podleś. ©Michael Cooper.
2007-04-23
Elektra