Salomé, Wexford Festival, review: 'intriguing'

Antoine Mariotte's dull operatic version of Oscar Wilde's tale is given a surprisingly successful makeover at the Wexford Festival

Na'ama Goldman in the title role of Antoine Mariotte's 'Salomé'
Na'ama Goldman in the title role of Antoine Mariotte's 'Salomé' Credit: Photo: Clive Barda

Sometimes known as "the other Salome", Antoine Mariotte's opera hardly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Richard Strauss's famous work, yet their histories are fascinatingly intertwined. Both based on the same Oscar Wilde source, they were composed in parallel, with Strauss getting in first with his 1905 Dresden premiere. By the time Mariotte's opera was unveiled in Lyon in 1908, Strauss and his publisher had gone to considerable lengths to suppress the French work, fuelling Franco-German tensions, but they need hardly have bothered: natural selection would soon have sunk it anyway.

A century on, it remains an interesting curiosity, ideal for the underdog-favouring Wexford Festival Opera, devoted as ever to rarities of the lyric stage. On that basis, Salomé is worth exhuming, even if it lacks Strauss's genius. There is nothing memorable or striking about the thickly-textured score, which in its steady, unrelenting pulse seems to be typical of the style of Mariotte (1875-1944). Wexford gives the music its best chance, thanks to strong orchestral playing under the baton of David Angus.

It is not simply a matter of the difference between German expressionism and French decadence. The Avignon-born composer was a pupil of the arch-reactionary Vincent D'Indy, and his music seems ill-suited to the subject. The Dance of the Seven Veils is almost the weakest part of the score, though it is not helped here by Vittorio Colella's laughable choreography.

Oddly enough, Mariotte's opera is soprano-less: apart from the like-mother-like-daughter suggestion of casting Herodias and Salomé both as mezzos, it makes little musical sense, and here Na'ama Goldman's petulant princess cannot always project over the orchestra, despite warm tone. Nora Sourouzian makes the most of Herodias's slightly more sharply characterised music. Herod is a bass, with less comic potential than Strauss's whining tenor, and he is well sung by Scott Wilde, but the strongest performance comes from the muscular, dark baritone of Igor Golovatenko as John the Baptist.

The Page (Emma Watkinson) is a constant presence in Rosetta Cucchi's generally straightforward production. A crown substitutes for the gory head at the end, though instead we are shown a headless John the Baptist. Claudia Pernigotti's costumes may evoke Asterix, but Tiziano Santi's set focuses the action with a series of crumbling proscenium arches, like the diaphragm of a camera. While it is rare for such a boring opera to feel so intriguing, it is probably best to draw at least one of Salome's veils over this work again.

The Wexford Festival Opera runs to Nov 2 2014; wexfordopera.com/