By Peter McCallum
SALOME
Richard Strauss
Opera Australia
Opera House, October 12
Reviewer's rating: 4 and a half out of 5 stars
CHERYL BARKER could have been a sulky teenager needing pocket money as she glowered with twisted mouth and demanded the head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist) on a silver platter. In Oscar Wilde's play, Salome is stylised and strange. In Strauss's opera, everything is inflated with Wagnerian mythology but the romantic value system is inverted so that desire is sickness and redemptive love becomes perversity.
The director of this new production of Strauss's essay in sensational decadence, Gale Edwards, has inserted modern psychological realism so that characters have motivation but not justification. Salome is a spoilt but abused princess, Herod a weak hedonist with paedophile tendencies, Herodias is consumed with privileged vindictiveness, and Jokanaan is a fundamentalist not untempted by the flesh.
Visually, Brian Thomson's sets and Julie Lynch's design are gaudy and striking, with Herod's feast lined up at the back before a wall of carcasses, like a perversion of the last supper, while the sewer-like cistern where Jokanaan is imprisoned dominates the forestage with the action radiating from it.
A spoilt but abused princess … Cheryl Barker as Salome.Credit: Lisa Tomasetti
In Kelley Abbey's choreography, the dance of the seven veils becomes a parade of tawdry male fantasies where teenagers, maids, pole dancers and Marilyn Monroe impersonators cavort discomfortingly. Musically powerfully, visually striking, dramatically gripping, the production takes a work that is sensational rather than truth-seeking, and inserts it garishly into contemporary mythology.
Barker's mixture of warmth and strength has previously resulted in fine performances in traditional ''spinto'' roles mixing lyricism and power. This performance, combining impressive vocal clarity, power and stamina alongside theatrical persuasiveness, opens a new horizon of possibilities in the darker dramatic roles and was as compelling as anything she has done, right up to the lurid A-sharps of her consummating kiss.
In a musical language of chromatic distortion, Strauss gives Jokanaan unsullied tonal melody, but John Wegner portrayed the role not as pale-mouthed prophet dreaming, but with fiery passion of a religious zealot. His voice was richly resonant in the lower register and lyrically expressive in the upper. John Pickering was a Herod with an all-too-believable weakness, singing with penetrating edge and ardour, while Jacqueline Dark was imposing, full-toned and monstrous as Herodias.
There was a cameo musical-dramatic moment in the opening encounter between David Corcoran, a richly coloured Narraboth, the young and fatally infatuated captain, and Sian Pendry the mournful page who foresees the consequences.
Leading strong playing from the orchestra, the conductor Johannes Fritzsch held together the extravagantly excessive musical fabric with mature focus, always pushing the tension to its dramatic edge. The interjections of soldiers (Adrian Tamburini, Tom Hamilton and Andrew Moran) and the musically complex ensemble of disputing religious leaders (Kanen Breen, Graeme Macfarlane, Benjamin Rasheed, Brad Cooper, Gennadi Dubinsky, Shane Lowrencev and Sitiveni Talei) were richly sustained.