SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Strauss: Salome Vancouver Opera, soloists, Conductor: Jonathan Darlington, Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver, British Columbia, 7.5.2009 (BJ)

Director Joseph McClain
Scenic designer Robert Dahlstrom
Costume designer Sarah Gates
Lighting designer Gerald King,

This clean, honest, and highly effective production of Salome came as a welcome corrective after the eccentricities of the Rigoletto Vancouver Opera presented in March. Indeed, with the exception of a few minutes of rather pretentious dumb show that preceded the start of the music, everything in Joseph McClain’s staging clicked, and everything served the cause of the work rather than asserting directorial superiority over it.

On Robert Dahlstrom’s handsome and simple set, unfussily lit by Gerald King, the singers were able to move economically and well. In the same spirit, all of them, from Sean Panikkar’s sympathetic Narraboth, by way of the smaller roles, to John Mac Master’s keenly observed Herod Antipas and Judith Forst’s aptly venal Herodias, offered lucid and often riveting characterization.

The singing, too, was on a high level almost throughout the cast, with Greer Grimsley, as Jokanaan, in particularly glorious voice. Both he and the Salome, Russian soprano Mlada Khudoley, were dramatically convincing, but I felt a certain want of sheer voluptuousness in Ms. Khudoley’s singing, which left a bit of a hole in the aural experience of the evening. The orchestral playing, however, under Jonathan Darlington’s direction, made up for that with a sumptuous realization of the score. The conductor’s choice of Salome, in his program note, as his favorite among all of Strauss’s operas runs diametrically counter to mine–I find it by far the least enjoyable of that splendid canon–but he made the best possible case for its musical richness.

Bernard Jacobson

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