Elektra, Gergiev, LSO, Barbican Hall | reviews, news & interviews
Elektra, Gergiev, LSO, Barbican Hall
Elektra, Gergiev, LSO, Barbican Hall
Felicity Palmer's Clytemnestra takes honours in a pulverising performance
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Richard Strauss's Elektra (1909): 'It can and should be moving, as well as unsettling'Boosey & Hawkes
Richard Strauss’s 1909 opera Elektra is a diabolical piece of work - less an opera than an event determined to cut its mark. A vast orchestra of 112 players unleashes a two-hour tsunami of sound across the stage, on which female voices are buffeted like pieces of driftwood, shrieking of mothers who murder husbands, daughters who want to murder mothers, rivers of blood, flayed horses, dogs, bodies. Subtle it isn’t. Loud it is. In the hands of Valery Gergiev and London Symphony Orchestra this week, pulverisingly loud.
Richard Strauss’s 1909 opera Elektra is a diabolical piece of work - less an opera than an event determined to cut its mark. A vast orchestra of 112 players unleashes a two-hour tsunami of sound across the stage, on which female voices are buffeted like pieces of driftwood, shrieking of mothers who murder husbands, daughters who want to murder mothers, rivers of blood, flayed horses, dogs, bodies. Subtle it isn’t. Loud it is. In the hands of Valery Gergiev and London Symphony Orchestra this week, pulverisingly loud.
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