★★★★★
“Honesty is the best policy”, “Goodwill towards men”, “Trial by jury”: these are a few of the moral mottos that loom over the audience inside Leeds Town Hall. There was no set for Opera North’s Salome, but this frieze offers a telling contrast with the amoral maelstrom unleashed on stage. Sexual obsession, necrophilia, death: probably not quite what the good folk of Victorian Leeds had in mind. I can imagine one or two might have had things to say about Oscar Wilde’s scandalous 1891 play and Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera.
That’s the point. Strauss’s Salome is shocking. In PJ Harris’s lightly directed concert staging, our attention is rewardingly focused on the tumult of emotions and transgressive desires, with an outstanding central performance by Jennifer Holloway. She catches all the complexities and conflicts of the Judean princess: at once a petulant spoilt child and a woman who mistakes lust and infatuation for love, weary of being leered at and objectified, and unable to interrogate her own destructive urges.
This performance plays with our imagination. The voyeuristic Dance of the Seven Veils takes place off stage; Salome returns shell-shocked. What has taken place? We can only guess. But Holloway’s guttural demands for Jokanaan’s head (which we also don’t see) are pure revenge, sitting as happily in her voice as the floated high notes and ecstatic outpourings.
Robert Hayward’s capacious, otherworldly bass-baritone couldn’t be better for the imprisoned prophet, while Arnold Bezuyen’s Herodes is fervent and Katarina Karnéus superb as his exasperated wife. There are strong turns in the smaller parts. Black-tie dress for the singers suggests Herodes’s feast. Jamie Hudson’s lighting is spot-on, moving from strange moonlight to blood-red at the brutal end. Strauss wraps it in an orchestral score of uneasiness, visceral horror and ravishing beauty, masterfully paced by the conductor Sir Richard Armstrong.
On tour to May 16; operanorth.co.uk