Conspiracy theorists will doubtless spend days pondering Sir Brian McMaster’s decision to launch his final season as Edinburgh International Festival director with a concert performance of Richard Strauss’s 1909 opera about bloodlust, perversion, hysteria, madness and vicious revenge among the Ancient Greeks. A veiled allusion to the joys of dealing with the Scottish Arts Council and Edinburgh City Council? I couldn’t possibly comment — except to observe that they don’t call Edinburgh the Athens of the North for nothing.
Either way, the show (sponsored by Scottish & Newcastle) was a brilliantly noisy way to set proceedings going. A cast as good as this could make a gripping melodrama out of the Yellow Pages.
Pride of place must go to the veteran Serbian mezzo Leandra Overmann, who didn’t so much sing the role of Klytemnästra as turn her into a walking Hammer House of Horrors. Her chest-register could hold an army at bay. In the title role Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet was spine-chillingly powerful in the big, deranged moments, but a few purrs short of sumptuousness in the great monologue where Elektra incestuously drools over her returning brother, Orest. He was portrayed, with ominous dark tone, by Iain Paterson. And another outstanding performance, touchingly bewildered then crazed with grief, came from Silvana Dussmann as the unfortunate Chrysothemis — the girl who just wants to find a nice bloke and have kids, but instead watches half her family murder the other half.
Conducting this stunning cast (and I hope he felt privileged) was young Edward Gardner, soon to become music director at English National Opera. On the whole, his handling of the vast orchestra (the alert Royal Scottish National) and the Straussian idiom was encouraging. With a crisp, unfussy beat he kept an immaculate ensemble and never let the band overwhelm the singers.
But perhaps, now and then, he should have done. Rather than seizing upon the emotive power of each instrumental strand in this complex, motif-packed score, he sometimes coasted over the surface. Still, at least he coasted neatly. The depth will come with experience.
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