![]() The set, by Boris Kudlicka, plays off the cliche that museum equals beige marble slabs. I can't recall a more complete performance by a singer. Her face, her acting, her hands would be so expressive even when she would be silent. Most amazingly, she fully embodied her character. She'd hold a long note and make it blossom and bloom. Goerke perfectly jumped through the vocal calisthenics, her voice strong enough to cut through the thick orchestral textures. Her vocal lines are hard edged and broken. SF OPERA TURANDOT SERIESThe whole opera splits into a series of scenes where she interacts with her sister, her mother, her brother, her father-in-law, each a rather harrowing confrontation. Actually, she is on stage even before it starts, as part of a pantomime of visitors checking out an antiquity display. Let's start with her: Goerke is on stage for the whole show. And these online streams did not have Christine Goerke, an Elektra for the ages. The YouTube versions did not have that witty, resourceful and amazing set and staging. The sheer force of the 100 musicians delivered a visceral sensory experience that laptop speakers totally failed. It could not prepare me for the actual performance. The music repeatedly trembles on the edge of what would come to be called atonality the far-flung chords that merely brush against each other in Salome now clash in sustained skirmishes." So I watched a couple YouTube productions to get a better feel for the piece. Alex Ross describes the music in the Rest is Noise as "an onslaught of dissonance and neurosis. It is relatively short, clocking at 1h45 but super intense. The last run at SF Opera was twenty years ago (by far the longest gap in between productions ever here). ![]() Strauss's opera, which opened in Dresden in 1909, is thoroughly modern and rarely performed. She hesitates between waiting for her brother Orest's return to do the deed, or convincing her sister Chrysotemis to do it with her. Anyhow, Elektra wants revenge for daddy's literal blood bath. His wife Klytemnestra and his cousin Aegisth, who had shacked up while he was away, offed him in his bath (it is not brought up in the libretto, but Agamemnon also had sacrificed his and Klyte's daughter Iphigenia to the gods on his way out, and came back from Troy with his lover Cassandra, stuff Klytemnestra may have found objectionable). It was a stroke of genius and a triumphant success.Įlektra was the daughter of Agamemnon, who upon his return from the Trojan war, unfortunately came to realize he had married an axe murderer. Obviously, I wasn't the only one: The production crew at SF Opera decided to use the same conceit of exhibits in a museum taking life in the middle of the night, to feature their own Greek tragedy, Elektra, as composed by Richard Strauss. Elektra: I once caught Ben Stiller's A Night at the Museum and thought: what a tragedy. ![]()
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