More depravity, please: Salome, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed

The first night of the new season at Covent Garden was cancelled when the solemn news came through. The second opened with a short, respectful speech from Oliver Mears, the director of opera, and a minute’s silence in which the houselights were lowered and we could gaze at the curtains, from which the huge gold-embroidered EIIR cypher had already been removed. For the first time in King Charles’s reign, we sang the national anthem to unfamiliar new words. There were shouts of ‘God Save the King!’And then the lights dimmed once more and we proceeded with the business of the evening, and the life of the Royal Opera.

Britain has never had a Court Opera in the continental sense, and that’s a good thing, sparing us the epic pomposity that disfigures so many European artistic institutions, and which was imported wholesale by the United States (expect a British orchestra to address you as ‘Maestro’ and you’ll be laughed off stage). The relationship between the opera and British royalty has always been more light touch. Arriving late at Covent Garden one afternoon, I was ushered, temporarily, into the vacant royal box. The sightlines were execrable, surely the worst in the house, with barely a third of the stage visible. That, presumably, is what Her late Majesty tolerated, uncomplaining, for all those years.

Anyway, the show went on, and if it’s difficult to think of a less appropriate opera for such a grave occasion than Richard Strauss’s Salome, it’s also hard to think of many circumstances in which Salome would ever be appropriate. That’s kind of the point: it’s blasphemous, it’s depraved, and the Vienna Court Opera banned it outright until after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy, when nothing in Austria really mattered any more. This is the fourth revival of David McVicar’s 2008 production, and in the hands of revival director Barbara Lluch it looks spotless, with a sickly greenish light illuminating the corridors beneath Herod’s pleasure palace. We glimpse only a corner of the decadence above stairs, where the Tetrarch appears to be hosting a distinctly Bunuel-ish dinner party.

Visually, then, it’s an uncomplicated updating. I’m not wholly sold on the Dance of the Seven Veils being presented as a cinematic fashion show, but it looks striking and cleverly sidesteps any of that reprehensible male-gazey stuff. Salome strips off in pursuit of her desires? Tut, tut – not here, she doesn’t. Muscle-bound slave gets naked for our viewing pleasure? Phwoar! Yes, thanks, point made, but there’s a deeper problem in McVicar’s presentation of Salome as victimised prey. Oscar Wilde’s text and Strauss’s music both show her wielding immense sexual power against a weak and ineffectual Herod. It’s not nice, but as Wilde once put it (and Strauss seems to have agreed) there is no such thing as moral or immoral art. If a staging of Salome operates within an audience’s ethical comfort zone, it’s doing something wrong.

Two elements stand out in the current revival. Malin Bystrom returns as Salome, and her progression from gamine society heiress (her wide eyes convey a horrible, penetrating innocence) to brutalised grotesque is appallingly watchable. Her voice is simultaneously rich and focused, spreading like a bloodstain across Strauss’s silken orchestration, before – in the final scenes – tightening and cooling into something implacable. She snarls; still more remarkably, at the end of 90 minutes of full-power singing, she soars. She emerges as the drama’s one fully realised character against a cast of brilliantly drawn caricatures: John Daszak’s wiry, reedy Herod, Katarina Dalayman’s blustering pea-hen Herodias and Jordan Shanahan’s suitably imposing Jokanaan.

In the pit, meanwhile, Alexander Soddy conducts an expressionist reading of Strauss’s score: Schiele rather than Klimt, with probing strings and great baleful blocks of horn tone. It’s taut, it doesn’t linger, and Soddy winkles out the awkward angles and dirty little corners of Strauss’s orchestral mosaic – grunting contrabassoon, slimy bass clarinet and shrilling, phosphorescent high woodwinds. The climactic dissonance felt rotten to the bone, as a near-possessed Salome fondled the oozing head of the slaughtered prophet. How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen.

At the South Bank, Paul Daniel conducted the London Philharmonic in a concert performance of Offenbach’s comedy La Princesse de Trébizonde: an underrated conductor reviving an almost forgotten score with quite irresistible affection and flair. It’s daft as a brush (Girl pretends to be waxwork; Prince falls in love with waxwork; can-cans ensue) but Offenbach’s melodies sparkle like dew, even with the spoken dialogue (a crucial component of the opéra-bouffe mix) stripped out and replaced with a narration (Harriet Walters, effortlessly wry). Virginie Verrez glowed in the trouser role of Prince Raphaël and Anne-Catherine Gillet bounced off the walls as the coquette Zanetta. The whole soufflé was recorded for release by Opera Rara, and it’s gone straight on to my wish list.