Opera Ireland

Salome - Strauss

Strauss's Salome was an instantly divisive success. Contemporary accounts record up to 38 curtain calls on the opening night in Dresden. Mahler was impressed, calling it "a real work of genius which belongs to the most important productions of our time! There labours and lives under a lot of rubbish a volcano, a subterranean fire - not mere fireworks!" Its detractors wrote of "nausea", an "exudation from the diseased and polluted will and imagination of the authors", and "that degrading, loathsome opera, Salome".

Dubliners, who on Sunday got their first opportunity to hear the work in the theatre, showed responses more akin to the Dresdeners of 1905 than to the sensitive souls who took exception to Strauss's score, which depicts the obviously distasteful perversion of the Eastern princess with the searing immediacy of pulp fiction.

Director Joel Lauwers and designer Louis Desire have come up with a production rich in symbols of decadence. The sharply-perspectived set suggests a claustrophobic tunnel, which is peopled by individuals, numbed or sated, troubled by lust or foreboding, within a strangely ritualised hothouse atmosphere.

With limitations imposed by both the Gaiety pit and the numerical strength of the RTECO, conductor Laurent Wagner cannot always get the orchestral mass to resonate as it should, nor is his approach really long-winded enough to carry through Strauss's extended paragraphs. Yet, in spite of all this, the music holds everything together.

Karen Notare's spunky Salome is sometimes overtaxed by Strauss's demands, though in her appropriate singlemindedness she introduces (thinking of Salome as 16?) suggestions of simple-mindedness, too. John Wegner is an unwavering Jokanaan (appearing, incredibly, with his head attached at the end - are we to take it all as a dream?), and Volker Vogel and Julia Juon are a couple both driven and fractious as Herod and Herodias.

Evan Bowers's Narraboth and Marianne Rrholm's Page (the latter at times looking ready to go literally up the wall) are both vocally impressive, and the many smaller roles are effectively taken.

Yet, as I say, the evening is Strauss's, and it is to be hoped that the audience's response will encourage Opera Ireland to fill some more of the glaring gaps in a city which has yet to see Elektra, Wozzeck, Lulu, and most of Janacek, let alone the operatic output of more recent years.