SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Other Links

Editorial Board

Google Site Search

Internet MusicWeb

Met Opera Live: Strauss, Salome Metropolitan Opera’s HD transmission live to the Barbican Cinema, London. 11.10.2008 (JPr)


This season there will be ten operas broadcast live from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to the Barbican Cinema and to other local cinemas throughout the UK. Presented with the aim of broadening the appeal of opera around the world,  these transmissions’ use of sophisticated camera work brings the audience on stage with the performers. For most operas there are conductor and cast interviews too and other behind-the-scenes documentaries or features designed to dispel the ‘mythology’ of opera and  to give some insight into how it is staged.

Karita Mattila caused a sensation when she sang Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Met for the first time in 2004. This  first Met Opera Live of the 2008/9 season brought us a reprise – as the advertising blurb described – of ‘her stunning interpretation of the part, including her unforgettable Dance of the Seven Veils.’ Anybody old enough to Google will know that when this production was first staged, Ms Mattila ended her ‘dance’ with a flash of full-frontal nudity, an explanation perhaps of why this showing was almost instantly sold-out at the Barbican.

In 1907, when  the Metropolitan Opera staged Salome for the first time,  the philanthropist J P Morgan’s daughter went pale at the sight of a soprano making out with a severed head, and the production was shut down after one night. So would we see Karita Mattila naked … of course not! Consider for a moment three words: American, cinema and nudity and there is your answer. A spokesman for the Met said that its HD broadcasts are ‘family-friendly events’ and that Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager  and the creative team ‘are treating the scene in a way that is sensitive to the artists while still being true to the original piece.’ I was forced to wonder how incestuous lust and the craving to kiss a severed head, among other things in Salome, could possibly be  part of a family event.

The producer Jürgen Flimm does not of course set his Salome at King Herod's court in biblical Judea.  ttogether with his set and costume designer, Santo Loquasto, a regular collaborator with Woody Allen and his films, and James F Ingalls’ lighting, he give us a single set Pandora's Box. Stage left are seemingly cardboard cut-out wavy dunes almost straight from Road to Morocco and  to the other side there is part of a palace or perhaps the perspex splendour of a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi. The dinner party of bored guests with too much money than is good for them,  takes place on an unseen floor down some stairs. The prophet Jochanaan rants against this ungodly lot from an unseen cell which appears to be inside an archaeological dig, eventually emerging from it in a cage that can be raised or lowered. Herod’s soldiers have turbans and kilts and on top of the ‘sand dunes’ ominous white-winged figures in black robes (purdah?) appear. There appeared to be seven of them at the end of the opera and  to me they seemed like vultures ready to consume the carcass(es)  of the rotten society depicted.

Salome is shown as a glamorous blonde in a slinky satin evening gown familiar from Hollywood of the 1930’s. For the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’, Ms Mattila begins by becoming Marlene Dietrich in male evening drag.  Doug Varone's choreography, such as it is, through much hip-wiggling and a mildly-erotic sashaying around gives us a gender-bending striptease and eventually Ms Mattila is in her underwear. Without revealing anything she removes her bra and the camera cuts away at the end. When we next see her,  Ms Mattila is covered in a simple black gown. What the Met audience saw is best left to the imagination and anyway what we saw of this ‘dance’ was quite enough, truthfully!  Ms Mattila is no longer the young girl of Oscar Wilde’s original play and Strauss was only partly joking when he said he wanted a 16-year-old with the voice of Isolde. Ms Mattila certainly has that voice but was only intermittently sexy enough to carry off the striptease and it was only when the bloodied severed head came up in the cage that her interpretation really took off.

She made us compliant in her character’s destruction. Undeniably she was full of demented lust, her body moving to every bar of Strauss’s frenzied music bringing herself to her own state of vocal and physical ecstasy as Strauss’s frenzied music reaches its orgasmic climax. Ms Mattila voice held out heroically against the orchestral onslaught – was it this loud at the Met or was the volume cranked up for the transmission? She certainly did not appear to hold anything back and thoroughly deserved the immediate standing ovation she received from the Met audience at her curtain call.

Barbara Willis Sweete who directed the transmission was responsible for the extremely irritating camerawork in the  Tristan und Isolde from the Met in March. With just a single set and a short opera there was not much to concentrate on except the individual singer’s faces -  which given the emotional intensity of the music and the uncertain prospect of chew-the-scenery performances was very sensible. Patrick Summers replaced the conductor Mikko Franck who is ill and gave us a rampantly rhapsodic account of the score.

There were notable contributions from others in the cast including Juha Uusitalo, (who I believe was making his debut at the Met)  as a booming Jochanaan. He was the only disappointment in the broadcast as for me his voice did not come over as well as others when he was on stage and still sounded as though he was down the shaft in his cell. He is a big and burly Finnish bass - baritone and it was impossible not to smile when Salome comments ‘How wasted he is’. Kim Begley was a leering, perspiring Herod who sang brightly and without undue campery. Ildikó Komlósi was suitably conspiratorial and revealed a dark-grained mezzo as Herodias Salome’s incestuous mother. Joseph Kaiser was a poignant Narraboth and there was a wonderfully formidable pronouncement from Morris Robinson’s First Nazarene: he appears to have an exceptional bass voice.

Without an interval we were saved some of the often unmissable corny interviews and ‘behind-the-scenes’ moments that longer operas allow us in these broadcasts. Before the opera began,  Deborah Voigt, who has sung Salome herself, lurked outside Karita Mattila’s dressing room. When Ms Mattila did eventually emerge and was asked to comment,  she  said ‘You know what I always say before this … let’s kick ass’. She did indeed!

Jim Pritchard

The Barbican Met Opera Live series continues on 8 November with John Adams’s 2005 opera Doctor Atomic: for further details visit www.barbican.org.uk/film or check the listings of your local cinemas. 


^{Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page}