Some operas work well in concert. The music, liberated from the pit, says everything needful about the drama. And the singers, released from staging demands, can concentrate on vocal expressivity. But after 100 shouty minutes on Saturday, with voice after voice battling to surmount a wall of orchestral sound, we can safely say that Salome isn’t one of those operas.
I don’t blame the BBC Philharmonic. It attacked Strauss’s savage, decadent score in the only way possible - at full throttle. A conductor less prone to pirouetting in mid-air than Gianandrea Noseda might have kept the volume down a bit. But the end result wouldn’t have been much different.
Nor do I fault the singers. It’s true that Peter Bronder - brilliantly playing Herod as a pervy tin-pot dictator unable to control his feelings or his kingdom - seemed mysteriously able to project all his words, whereas nearly everyone else sank without trace. But that may have been because Strauss’s orchestration is lighter, more like punctuation, when Herod sings.
I certainly felt sorry for the Salome, Nicola Carbone. Her voice sounded vibrant when it could be heard, even if it rarely suggested an overwrought teenage nymphomaniac. But her sotto voce high notes were hopelessly misjudged. She might as well have been singing the role in Stockport.
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The resilient tenor of J?rg D?rm?ller fared better as Narraboth. But Peteris Eglitis, banished to the rear choir stalls as the imprisoned Jokanaan, sounded under pressure, and even the normally impressive Dagmar Peckov? struggled to make any impact as Herodias.
So what we were given was an admirably well-prepared orchestral performance with a lot of people mouthing German at the front. Oddly, Strauss himself might have approved of that. He once famously shouted at an orchestra: “Play louder, I can still hear the singers!” But it made for a poor night of music-drama.
How did the miscalculation happen? Noseda imported the cast wholesale from the Teatro Regio in Turin, where he is the music director. So the BBC was piggy-backing on a ready-made production. It must have seemed a good idea at the time. And its sound engineers will presumably redress the imbalance between cast and orchestra when Radio 3 broadcasts the concert tomorrow night. But it’s a pity that the enjoyment of the audience in the hall was so compromised.