Elektra, Aix Festival, review

Evelyn Herlitzius is mesmerising in the title role of Patrice Chéreau's Elektra, says Rupert Christiansen.

Evelyn Herlitzius offers one of the greatest interpretations of Elektra
Evelyn Herlitzius offers one of the greatest interpretations of Elektra Credit: Photo: Pascal Victor/ArtComArt

Splattered with filth and vindictively angry, but like her spiritual brother Hamlet clearly mad only north-north-west, Evelyn Herlitzius' Elektra is a creature of mesmerising intensity - and surely an interpretation of this uniquely challenging role to rank with the greatest.

Singing tirelessly and trenchantly - her top notes searing, her delivery of the text pellucid - Herlitzius nails all the character's lithe foxy intelligence and never sinks to histrionic ham or rant.

Within this sharply focused psychological frame, the scene with Clytemnestra (an admirably restrained but vocally miscast Waltraud Meier) becomes unusually poignant - the end of a mother-daughter relationship rather than a drama-queens' spat.

Elektra's fate seems harder too: revenge doesn't suck her into a fulfilling vortex of death, it only expels her from humanity - after the final dance of triumph, she is left to stare into a void, as her agent Orestes (Mikhail Petrenko) scuttles off appalled.

Esa-Pekka Salonen's conducting is marvellously responsive to the subtlety of this approach. Keeping the dynamics firmly controlled, he sends the Orchestre de Paris mining beneath the score's façade of primitivist granite into layers of softer musical matter: the rapturous lyricism with which Chrysothemis (a glowingly confident Adrianne Pieczonka) begs for normality can rarely have seemed more urgently persuasive, or the recognition of Orestes more like a lullaby. This is an Elektra of dark, solemn dignity, which proves that Strauss's virtuosic instrumentation is never just extravagant colouring.

Much in the staging bears out Patrice Chéreau's reputation as one of the finest directors of modern theatre. The clichés of Fascist brutality and expressionist exaggeration are astutely avoided: this is a situation that involves human beings, not caricatures, in a visually neutral environment of bare walls, windows and doors (designed by Richard Peduzzi) which is also blackly portentous in atmosphere.

Chéreau handles the central soliloquies and dialogues with profound sensitivity to the complex of emotions they embody, but round the action's edges he falters.

Introducing a dumb show prologue is a mistake, and the weakly cast maids and servants, none of whom seem to know what they are meant to be doing, are amateurishly blocked. The mechanics of the plotting and execution of the murders haven't been thought through either, detracting from the power of the climax.

The result was a production which - despite the superlative contributions of Herlitzius and Salonen - doesn't quite pack its clinching punch.

Grand Theatre de Provence, until 22 July. Tickets:00 33 8 20922 923; festival-aix.com