Customer Reviews

Strauss: Elektra

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Having worn out the vinyl pressing I had of the Solti/Nilsson version which I have always thought was magnificent, I was hard pushed to decide whether to get that version on cd or try something new.

Having read reviews and listened to excerpts here I decided to take a risk and order this one, knowing how much I loved the Solti version with its huge sound, and Nilsson's powerful voice, which I was able to experience singing this role in the theatre a number of times.

As soon as I started to listen to this recording I felt a freshness, almost as though coming to the opera for the first time again, Sinopoli's account is high on detail and his tempi quite different from Solti, and it was entrancing.

Full marks also go to the cast, Ms Marc providing an excellent portrayal of the title role, which I didn't think could be bettered after Ms Nilssons recording. Of course the laser-like voice of Birgit Nilsson is unique to her, and suited works scored for a huge orchestra, but I found it easier to understand the words sung by the cast on this recording, all performances and characterisations are excellent, and there is no shortage of sonic orchestral depth and excitement.

I still love the Solti version, but wouldn't part with this recording ever.

I sometimes think that the perfect recording is only achievable by taking bits of all the very good recordings you know and mixing them together. That is my feeling about Elektra. I have long enjoyed Sawallisch's recording with Eva Marton like a vocal battleship out of control, Studer as a perfect Chrysothemnis and Lipovsek as a truly ghastly Klytemnestra. But then what of Nilsson's superhuman princess? Or Polaski's touching account? And Rysanek's searing Chrysothemnis? And Ludwig's perfect Klytemnestra? And so it goes on.

This recording looks interesting on papaer and so it proves. Alessandra Marc was surprisingly cast as Elektra and it took me time to warm to her. The voice is large yet eerily pure and warm. None of the wide vibrato of other exponents but also less of the brilliance. Those cruel top notes are never quite shrill nor effortful but they certainly cleave the air with some considerable force. She isn't the psychopath that others have been, and she commands great vulnerability and warmth at the key moments with her siblings. I must admit, I find her ever more involving every time I hear her in this role.

Indeed, the rest of the cast are a bit pallid next to her. Voigt is overwrought but tamer than others, though her gorgeous vocal performance is treasurable - I think she would make a far greater impact in the theatre where the full power of her voice would be heard. Hanna Schwarz is almost understated as Klytemnestra - no cackling, yodelling, whooping or yelling, but a true and subtle rendition of what Strauss wrote - and chilling for it. Ramey is solid and dependable, though lacks a truly germanic blackness to his voice, whilst Jerusalem is luxury in Aegisth's brief outbursts. The supporting roles are satisfactory, no more.

Sinopoli's playing of the score is like no other - slow, analytical, understated, yet with a really impressive grasp of the sweep of this hundred-minute hurtle into the abyss. He never lets himself get carried away by the irresistible dance rhythms, but gives Strauss's creepy orchestral scenery plenty of space to make its points. All in all, it's a masterly achievement and if you're willing to work with it it pays great dividends, even if it isn't as immediately impressive as other recordings have been.

This has to be one of the most at once perplexing and fascinating recordings of a Strauss opera I have ever run across. Tim Ashley wrote allusively of a link between music and the psychology from the Klytaemnestra scene and Mahler's setting in his Third Symphony of Zarathustra's midnight lied. The mysterious colors and stillness that Giuseppe Sinopoli and the Vienna Philharmonic find for the graphic account of the queen's hallucinations in this opera are perfectly apt, that one certainly can find a hint of reminiscence in Strauss's writing. The entire scene between Elektra and her mother is of central importance on this recording, in part for understanding Sinopoli's intentions with this opera.

Comments from the same review published in the August 1997 issue of Opera about broader issues haunt me, as I write mine. "What Sinopoli finds at he hart of this most neurotic of all operas is stylistic inconsistency and a plethora of hitherto unnoticed allusions." He then goes on to extrapolate how different conductors have tended to narrow Elektra down to one prevailing stylistic tendency or another. "Sinopoli will have none of this, doesn't make any attempt to pigeon-hole the score and emphasizes the stylistic content of individual moments rather than forging them into a unity." A few have found fault with this recording for doing just that. I likewise disagree that Sinopoli seems the less experienced Strauss maestro than on his earlier Salome on DGG. Ashley, however, then goes out just a bit on a limb, and finds in the Strauss and Sinopoli's approach tonal methodology of characterization specific to each of the two sisters and Klytaemnestra in this opera, all individually. His claims, in their unique way, do convince, but we're dealing with indeed quite a unique recording of Strauss's masterpiece. Experienced writer that he is, he certainly knows his risks, in his putting so much stock in this idea.

Chrysothemis, who suffers from disturbed psyche enough, does have a lot of music in E-Flat and in triple meter at that, but under Sinopoli, it is music that the more affirmative it sounds, the more tonally it is on the verge of turning the corner to lurch or go careening off the precipice. By the same token, the queen's music distractedly yet obsessively seeks stability, usually in musical terms of one of the royalty or domestic bliss motifs, with which this very tormented character can anchor her thought. Like Ashley, I am sure of Sinopoli working with compass in hand as how to clearly direct his forces through this complex work. Otherwise, we'd probably have so much bombast and superficial underlining of so much detail - never the case here.

Sinopoli's grasp of tonality in this score is as thorough as you'll find from any conductor who has approached it. In my estimation, he joins a small list of conductors whose work with this piece I would call great - Jochum, Bohm (from Dresden on DGG - still out of print), and Mitropoulos, and all of whom take the stage cuts. My wish is that Sinopoli might have opened one or two, instead of literally taking all of them. The broad tempos, and slight tendency to block certain passages tend to remind a little of Solti, the appeal to sensuality in the score, especially in the second part of the Recognition and Aegisth scenes, to Karajan yet this set convinces you that this set pretty much, from the podium perspective, stands on its own merits. Unlike Karajan, nothing orchestrally at least, for a moment, is on autopilot, as seemed to be a little the case the last time I have heard such estimable Strauss maestri Levine and Welser-Most conduct Elektra.

One can read in any musically annotated synopsis of Elektra of the bitonality of repeated alternating, then simultaneous triads in F MInor and B Major in the Klytaemnestra scene. Sinopoli brilliantly weaves the most climactic occurrence of this polytonality into the dramatic trajectory of Klytaemnestra's 'nightmare' monologue and thereby categorically reveals that the polarity that is central to the composer's mind for the long stretch is between the key areas of B Major and C Minor, as similar to the close of Zarathustra. Making such occurence apparently happen within any normal scheme of things, as with these triads, seems even more frightening than its standing alone, as it would in a more bombastic interpretation, as with Solti or a young Levine.

There is also, in so boldly relating stylistic disparity in this piece, quite another trajectory that spells out. The central scene between Elektra and her mother takes the listener as close to as far out as Strauss would ever take us, and then following this with the second Chrysothemis scene (though quite heavily cut here) and Recognition Scene, we are already more than beginning to hear the Strauss of such intimate conversational lyricism, as found from Rosenkavalier to follow through Intermezzo and Arabella to his swansong, Capriccio. And yet, Sinopoli is always acutely aware of every potentially tonally destabilizing moment that will crop up throughout the rest of the opera. Of those heard earlier, it is hard to shake off hearing bassons and horns let off as dogs in heat, the 'stifled breath' upward appoggiaturi from solo horn early on in the first Chrysothemis scene, the hideous whelps and moans from the brass in the fearful procession that announce Klytaemenstra's entrance, the inebriated lurching around of double basses, making almost triplet figures out of one of the procession motifs, some of this all culminating in the wildly animated accompaniment to "Was bluten muss?", that almost overwhelms our attention to what is being sung.

So, what of this Elektra as an opera recording? It seems otherwise that I am reviewing a recording of Strauss's greatest tone poem. It is as opera, two vivid (supporting) tenors apart, that things fall off a bit. Alessandra Marc certainly is nowhere short of the stamina to sing this most treacherous of all parts and convincingly portrays a woman clearly near the end of her tether. Tone tends to be hooty, and diction mushy; an overall sameness tends to take over, expressively. She sings at once at her most impassioned and intimate in feeling during the Recognition Scene, and is well able to capitalize here more than anywhere else, on Sinopoli's support.

Debroah Voigt sings very well, bringing out well the innocence of the Chrysothemis, but here is an interpretation that is a little slow to open out expressively. It is hardly less tiresome, in the interest of bringing out greater hysteria with this part, to encounter a wobbly or unsteady voice here, as this so often makes cliche out of such an approach to this music. Hanna Schwarz, soloist on Sinopoli's fine and underrated Mahler Third (perhaps DGG's best recording of this piece) by the way, is the Klytaemnestra here. Low notes are not too clearly dependable here, but of the three female protagonists hereand also among Klytaemnestras, one gets unfailingly from Schwarz the most subtle and pointed verbal insights, even if a little greater stamina is called for in closing passages to be anywhere nearly as ghoulishly menacing to her daughter, as for instance Lipovsek on the complete Sawallisch (EMI). Regina Resnik (whose peerlessly mysterious reading of Zarathustra's song from Mahler 3 on the classic Martinon/Chicago broadcast eloquently bespeaks her experience as a great Klytaemnestra), Jean Madeira, and Gusta Hammer (Jochum) are at least equally formidable.

Samuel Ramey is expressive and has sufficiently dark tone as Orest, but is a little choppy, all of the above a little remindful of Tom Krause on Nilsson/Solti. He also becomes a bit unstable vocally as his part becomes more animated, toward the moment of recognition, in his crucial scene with Marc. The Overseer of Helga Termer stands out among the female supporting cast, for incisiveness, also the ruling virtue with the Young Servant of Michael Howard (the fine Mime during Sinopoli's Ring for only one summer at Bayreuth several years later). Siegfried Jerusalem is a suitably imperious and incisive Aegisth, tantalized and enticed almost most of all by Sinopoli's play with the sonorities and subtle touches with flutes and harp - what little lost love Strauss ever had for tenors.

We can't hold on to Birgit Nilsson forever. She made an incomparable Elektra, and every other recorded soprano, even Leonie Rysanek and Inge Borkh, excellent as they are in their own right, pales beside her in terms of vocal power, intensity, and splendor. Solti also gave the music 10,000 volts, which galvanized what was already a barbaric, lurid score. Their Decca recording will never be surpassed unless a new golden age of opera dawns.

This digital Elektra, however, has its strong pluses, especially in Sinopoli, who conducts with real inspiration, and the recorded sound is stupendous, fully the equal of Decca's and perhaps an edge less shrill and biting.

The two leads, Alessandra Marc and Deborah Voigt, aren't a big problem for me. They sing with gorgeous tone and thanks to the engineers easily soar over the massive orchestra. But neither is exceptionally dramatic; they don't eviscerate themselves onstage, which is what Strauss really wanted. That said, there are no better Strauss sopranos around right now in these roles, so they will have to do.

All in all, this is the best Elektra since Solti's, which is saying something.

I've had this set for over 12 months and have hesitated from reviewing it before. Having come to this performance from Solti's recording of the same opera with Nilsson, I was initially disappointed. Parts of it are terrific, superb and just plain gorgeous and other parts have you wondering what went wrong. I really wanted to like this performance, having enjoyed Sinopoli's 'Salome' recording. Like the reviewer below, I have to take one star off automatically for the savage cuts in the score. There is absolutely no excuse for having these cuts in a studio performance. Solti's set has the score given in full. Alessandra Marc, the Elektra in Sinopoli's set, is a singer I'd not heard before. I'm not sure if I like her voice or not. It's not really beautiful and has a weird sort of vibrato. Also, she can't pronounce vowels for some reason so many of the words sound the same. Perhaps the most distracting element of her singing is the way she swoops up to a high note from a lower note (her cry of 'Sei verflucht!' is revolting). The voice often sounds ungainly and plain ugly, especially after the piercing exactitude and clarity of Nilsson for Solti. Where Marc scores over Nilsson is in the quiet parts of the role: for example, throughtout the long scene with Orestes (also cut) and especially during the scene with Aegisthus. Marc is much more coy and seductive here than Nilsson. Marc's protrayal of Elektra can by no means be called an unqualified success but there's enough in it to keep this listener returning to her interpretation. As has been stated below, the best reason for buying this set is Sinopoli's explosive, majestic rendering of the score. It all sounds quite magnificent, much more subtle than Solti. The whole thing is utterly gorgeous from beginning to end. Like Marc, Sinopoli is especially good during the Aegisthus scene where the music dances along in a quite bewitching manner, far better than Solti. The mad, psychotic waltz at the conclusion is superb: a genuine conclusion to the opera. The other cast members are good, if not quite as convincing as in Solti's earlier set. Schwarz as Clytemnestra can't really come close to Resnik but Voigt makes a decent Chrysothemis. The guys do a good enough job. I can't stand Solti's Stolze as a singer, so having Siegfried Jerusalem here as Aegisthus was a blessing. The VPO play with their customary brilliance and warmth and the recorded sound is astounding (although when listening on headphones I could detect a distracting 'squeak' occasionally, like a wheel that needed oiling, especially during Voigt's early scene).
I wouldn't want to be without the Solti set, especially for Nilsson's psycho-performance which is quite astonishing, but Sinopoli's set, if you give it time to work on you, does offer a different, but no less enjoyable, sort of experience.

One of the reviewers suggests that the estimable Bohm/Borkh recording is not available. It is -- just go the the advanced search here at Borders.

I continue to be mesmerized by the uniquely beautiful voice of Alessandra Marc. She is certainly one of the most controversial talents in today's world of singers, almost bewilderingly so, in terms of the range of responses to her. I think she's incredible. Samuel Ramey seems a bit bored and although Deborah Voigt's well-sung Chrysothemis is more accurate than Leonie Rysanek's, she comes off a good second because of Rysanek's amazing intensity. Rest of performers and conductor all fine. Marc's voice is better suited, I think, for this part (at least on record) than it is for Chrysothemis.

White-hot orchestrally and revved-up in state-of-the-art DG sonic splendor, Sinopoli's lunge at Strauss' Elektra is worth hearing. But it's not an unqualified triumph. First of all, stage cuts take chunks out of a score which, on a full-priced CD, should be complete (there's a huge excision during Elektra's eruption of loathing toward Clytemnestra; sure, it saves the soprano from early death, but it can be sung and it has been sung). Second, Alessandra Marc's huge and honeyed voice, wonderful to hear in (for instance) Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony, or as Sieglinde in Dohnanyi's Walkure, lacks the Big-Bertha firepower this above all roles demands. The other men and women are not more than just not bad (Voigt delivering another impressive but unmoving appearance; Schwarz not coming close to Resnik or Meier in malevolent intensity). But to bring this opera off stunningly in every department is all but impossible; the aural impact and conductor's fervor of this version (recorded live, I believe) come close to compensating.

I have this recording for several years now and I consider it to be the best register of the opera there is. I didn't place a review before because first I wanted to listen to Alessandra Marc «live». Some previous reviews state that her voice is much smaller than the recording suggests and that she had a big help from the sound engineers. I've attended live performances of «Turandot» in Lisbon and Barcelona and I cannot confirm those statements at all. Her voice sounds on the stage with the same luxurious grandeur that she displays here. If there's a singer in this set that doesn't need any help from the sound engineers, that's Alessandra Marc.

It's true that parts of the score have been edited out and that such a choice has only favoured the competing complete recordings. Nevertheless, if we judge this work on it's whole rather than by it's parts, we'll come across with the most fierce result around. Giuseppe Sinopoli makes such an intensive and intuitive reading (an exceptional thing for an Italian mixing with German repertoire) that all other recordings are overshadowed just by his interpretation. We learn from the first bars that something horrible has already taken place and that what's about to follow is even more sinister. The sense of madness comes forth through the energy of the conducting.

In the title role, Alessandra Marc shows full understanding of the character. Her rendition belongs to the Golden Age of singing, when Leonie Rysanek and Inge Borkh were competing fiercely to make the role their own. As a true singing actress, she really gives herself to the trouble of making a red hot portrayal, something very rare today and not fully understood by today's audiences, used to more uncommitted performances.

Now to the rest of the cast. I also had the chance to hear each one of them live on the stage or on the concert hall. Hanna Schwarz as Klytämnestra is also a study case of a singing actress on a Golden Age perspective. One can't deny that her voice is not pleasing and her singing is not perfect, but she sings with such passion and involvement that every shortcoming is forgotten. One must always remember singers from the past whose singing wasn't perfect but who could always touch us through exceptional portrayals: Rysanek (again), Maria Callas, Maria Caniglia and Set Svanholm are just a few examples.

Samuel Ramey, a bass, has a voice too low for the part of Orest (bass-baritone Walter Berry was the perfect Orest; just listen to him next to his wife Christa Ludwig on the Recognition Scene under Hans Hollreiser) although - once more - it's the portrayal that counts. His expressiveness and sweetness when he recognizes his sister is heartbreaking.

Siegfried Jerusalem is the small luxury of this set. One could expect an unknown tenor on the rise or a tenor on the fall to be given this job, but a tenor on the height of his powers (he was still singing Tristan) is something not expected. Despite it's brevity, it's a very intense and complex role (an arrogant coward disguised as a valiant) and Siegfried Jerusalem brings all its nuances out.

The weak link in most of the existing recordings of «Elektra» seems to be the role of Chrysothemis. To me, the only three entirely satisfying Chrysothemis on record are: Leonie Rysanek (under Richard Kraus), Cheryl Studer (under Wolfgang Sawallisch) and Alessandra Marc (on the Daniel Baremboim set). A strange thing as lyrical and lyrico-spinto sopranos are more easy to cast than the rare dramatic soprano. Deborah Voigt is merely adequate here, not plunging into the tortured depths of the character. Besides, when listening to her on the stage, it's obvious that her voice has a strong and beautiful and ringing top, but she lacks a reliable and audible middle. Still, in this recording that weakness is well concealed. It seems that the sound engineers did have some work after all.

In 1967 Georg Solti's recording of Richard Strauss' ELEKTRA, starring Birgit Nilsson, was released on the London/Decca label. Although that recording is now a classic, I would venture to say that the conducting and Nilsson's performance (hers is the most effortlessly sung Elektra on disc) are the main reasons it is admired today. Its stereo sound, so notable a feature in 1967 (it was the first stereo ELEKTRA), is somewhat less impressive to modern ears, accustomed as they are to high-definition sound. Solti's ELEKTRA still deserves its classic status; but because it boasts a superior supporting cast, strong and fresh conducting, and good if less aggressive sound, I dare say that Giuseppe Sinopoli's 1995 ELEKTRA for DG can safely be selected as an alternative to the Solti.

For my taste the principal weakness of that classic ELEKTRA is its cast of supporting singers. For example, Marie Collier, Solti's Chrysothemis, sounds bleating and shrill; her tone as recorded is most unlike that of Deborah Voigt for Sinopoli. One of the most familiar operatic sounds of the 1990's was that of Voigt singing Chrysothemis' monologue ("Ich kann nicht sitzen..."). For me this recording brings back memories of Voigt's gloriously sung Chrysothemis in a 2002 Metropolitan Opera broadcast ELEKTRA -- with the unfortunate difference that the DG engineers have not fully captured the expansiveness of her luminous high register. Voigt's 2003 EMI disc, OBSESSIONS, on which she also sings the famous monologue, more faithfully reproduces the sound of her voice as heard "live."

Hanna Schwarz as Klytaemnestra is, instead of the usual grotesque, a vain if fading "glamor queen" remarkably successful at masking her insecurities. Unlike Regina Resnik for Solti, Schwarz's voice is youthfully firm. And not to worry: that Met broadcast ELEKTRA proved her low register to be much warmer and rounder than it records.

Samuel Ramey is a bit of luxury casting as a stoic and, of course, a most musical Orest. His bass-baritone, regrettably too low for John the Baptist in Strauss' SALOME, is perfect for the much smaller yet pivotal role of Elektra's long-lost brother. Siegfried Jerusalem is another bit of luxury casting as Aegisth.

Now for Elektra herself. Alessandra Marc revels in a huge, warm, and gleaming soprano. The "core" of her voice is deeper than Nilsson's, with the result that her high notes (unlike Nilsson's) slice through the air with a certain harshness -- a quality not out of character for Elektra. Marc scores in Elektra's three big moments: the entrance monologue, the Recognition Scene, and the final scene. The stifled tone she produces for the phrase "im seine kalten Klufte" ("in his cold tomb") is memorable, as is the command with which she sings the entire entrance monologue. Sinopoli takes the Recognition monologue -- which Marc seems to sing all in one breath! -- a bit to fast for full expressiveness; in the final scene he and Marc work together well, capturing Elektra's hysterical joy. Throughout the recording Marc's diction could be clearer; her eerily pure and beautiful tone could not be more of a luxury or a relief in this (mostly) violent music.

I do not know enough about conducting to be able to comment in great detail on Sinopoli's approach to the opera. But I will say that his approach made the score sound to me almost like new music and that his conducting is less weighty than that of James Levine, who led the Met broadcast. As an Italian specializing in German music, the late Sinopoli no doubt had his detractors and his fans; his approach to ELEKTRA will, I am sure, frustrate the former and thrill the latter.