Customer Reviews

Strauss: Salome

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This is an amazing recording of "Salome" and quite possibly the greatest recording Montserrat Caballe' ever made of a complete role. Despite her identification with Italian opera (and in her case, it means a repertoire of just about every Italian opera ever written from Mozart through Puccini!), the role of the depraved Princess of Judea fits her like a glove. What is even more incredible is the fact that Caballe' was able to bring her Salome to the stage in several European opera houses, most notably in Barcelona, from which venue a video was made in 1989. This recording was made twenty years earlier, and Caballe's voice is in absolutely pristine condition. She characterizes the sick-child-princess with deadly deliberation and purpose. Her articulation of the German language is exemplary, and she absolutely COMMANDS virtually every aspect of Strauss' insanely difficult and almost unsingable music. In this recording, the Final Scene almost becomes a sexual transfiguration. On every count, an extraordinary performance from an extraordinary artist. As the unfortunate John the Baptist, Sherrill Milnes is in his youthful prime and provides Caballe' with an ideal foil in their great confrontation scene. Regina Resnik is an appropriately bitchy Herodias and James King a good King Herod. Leinsdorf does not bring from the orchestra the sounds of Georg Solti on the London recording with Birgit Nilsson (another great "Salome" recording), but is compelling and dramatic. But on this particular recording, it is the Salome of Montserrat Caballe' by which this recording triumphs.

Reading the previous 2 reviews as well as a lot of other comments regarding Caballe, a lot of people must not know that Caballe started her career singing mostly Strauss (Salome and the Marschallin, for example), French opera as well as some standard Italian roles, including Verdi, Puccini and Mozart. Her repertoire was quite inpressive even before she was known internationally. She only became the "Queen of Bel Canto" several years into her career after her "international debut" in '65 singing Lucrezia Borgia at Carnegie Hall. She then started to take on many other Bel Canto roles -- but was reluctant to take on Norma for several years - ironically becoming the leading Norma of her day after Callas and Sutherland stopped singing it. In fact, it was Sutherland who finally convinced her to sing it. She continued to sing her German and French roles throughout her career along with the Bel Canto and Italian roles. She just sung them primarily in European and South American houses. So this isn't a case of the studio companies getting a major singer to sing a role she or he isn't suited for just for financial intentions.

There is a also live recording on the Opera D'Oro label of her singing this role in 1971. I'm sure there are other pirate recordings of her singing it.

Now, about my opinion on this recording, I love it. But then I love everything she does!

If for no other reason, one should own this recording of Salome to hear Caballe and Milnes perform this wonderful Opera. They both are impeccable!

I had not realised before I listened to this that the Santa Fe listener had already written a review which says pretty much everything I wanted to say, but I can add a few of my own to his perceptive comments. This is clearly one of Leinsdorf's best recordings, worthy to rank alongside his "Die Walküre" (see my review); my only slight difference with Santa Fe is to observe that I do not think Leinsdorf is so much too relaxed as unvaried; he keeps the "pedal to the metal" throughout and thus creates a febrile atmosphere which leaves little room for the kind of subtleties that Karajan finds in his account. The LSO responds to his insistence on momentum and plays superbly; the result is a big, crude, exciting, indulgent, Expressionist splurge of sound. Fortunately, this generalised, gung-ho onslaught on the score is counter-balanced by the nuance and delicacy of the young Caballe's interpretation of Salome. I worried that she might not find the right voice as she can sometimes sound matronly - but not here; she floats her trademark pianissimi to suggest the chilling faux-naiveté of the twisted teenager - and of course, given her early experience performing in Germany, her German is very convincing. Milnes gives us a Jokanaan of the kind I like and which compares with Van Dam in the Karajan: a noble, soaring-voiced prophet whose diatonic music and stern warnings sound like the voice of divine judgement when set against the crazed decadence of Herod's court. Unfortunately, the dramatically convincing and justified sound-effect of placing Milnes' voice deep in the cistern-prison means that we cannot hear him as well as I would have liked. Richard Lewis' Herod is a tour de force, very well sung and bringing out all the craven nastiness of the most unhinged monarch in opera. James King gives us a suitably neurotic and angst-ridden Narraboth and although Regina Resnik's Herodias is a bit worn, this is not unsuitable for that raddled old whore and she characterises skilfully. (I always enjoy Herodias' cackling mockery of Herod when he attempts to bribe Salome by offering her his collection of milk-white peacocks: "Und du, du bist lächerlich mit deinem Pfauen.") and the rest of the cast consists of some of the best British singers around in the late 60's; particular mention must go to Michael Rippon's rich-toned First Nazarene.

This set has been neglected in favour of the Solti and Karajan versions; I like very much all three as they all offer a valid and absorbing take on this wonderfully concise concentrated opera. (One wonders whether Strauss could not have been so rigorous and economical in other of his works, which have more than their fair share of "mauvais quarts d'heure".)

You'll find this listed twice with Borders/Amazon. At the other listing, you can buy it at regular CD prices, with a few used sets going for strangely-elevated prices. Here, on this listing, are used sets going for up to $100! All seem to be the very same RCA set (which, by the way, is a brilliant one with Caballe probably the best Salome on disc). It's still in the RCA catalog. So what's all the confusion about?

If Strauss set out deliberately to declare in musical terms, "I belong to a decadent culture," he could not have done a more effective job than this elegant-kooky opera based on a play by Oscar Wilde. The music and performance are outstanding but in the service of amoral-immoral driftings, probably influenced by Debussy's amoeboid Pelleas and Melisande. Melisande drifts in prolonged infancy; Salome, in psycho-erotic lunacy. Salome's chief motive is a perverted adoration of John the Baptist's body, bathed in moonlight but now imprisoned in a cistern or gigantic honey pot. The prophet of repentance preaches in vain like an evangelist at an orgy of Satanists. The language of Luther has never been linked to a less Lutheran set of words. The uncanny music itself interprets Herod's family as a communion of moon goons.

John the Baptist is named Jokanaan for anthropological correctness. The opening lines of the opera establish the nature of the whole: "How strange the moon seems! [Salome] is like a woman rising from a tomb." Rather like the corrupt nuns raised from their tombs in Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable. Salome is an Aesthetic ghoul eager to feed on the pale green flesh of a moribund prophet, who calls in vain for her to repent. She must be posing for a role in a second version of the Picture of Dorian Gray (the painting, not the novel) where she can console Dorian's degenerating image: "How pale the Princess is./ Never have I seen her so pale./ She is like the shadow/ of a white rose in a mirror of silver." Sooner or later the ghoul gets around to Jokanaan's decapitated head: "Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me/ to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan./ Well, I will kiss it now./ I will bite it with my teeth/ as one bites a ripe fruit." She is auditioning for a part as one of Dracula's daughters in Murnau's Nosferatu.