| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 1-May-2013 Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts | Atom Egoyan's strong, intoxicating Salome at the Canadian Opera Company |
 Atom Egoyan’s production of Richard Strauss’ Salome is styled for extreme contrasts. You could think of it as Springtime for Herod in Judea. While patrons spilling out of limos, taxis and Wheel-Trans were gathering on this magnolia blossom-filled May Day evening in the plaza outside the opera house’s glass façade, a parade hedged by bicycle cops was filing by. It flaunted floats carrying portraits of Karl Marx, with acrobats, dancers, jugglers and marching bands enthusiastically protesting AUSTERITY, demanding an END TO CAPITALISM, OIL SANDS, AND GMO’S.Read full review... | |
| 12-Oct-2012 Sydney Opera House: Opera Theatre | Heady stuff: A visceral production of Salome at Sydney Opera House |
 Salome was a huge, scandalous success at its 1905 première, and stagings of this, Richard Strauss’ third opera, have continued to shock audiences over the past century. This is hardly to be wondered at: after all, the title character’s final monologue ends with her kissing the severed head of John the Baptist, whom she has had executed for spurning her advances. The trifecta of religion, sex and violence was very much to the fore in Opera Australia’s new production, designed by Gale Edwards and her colleagues, which amped up the brutality and raunchiness considerably.Read full review... | |
| 31-May-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Wilde Headonism: Strauss’s Salome at the Royal Opera House |
 BARDA.jpg) Few live events could offer a more intense, visceral, grotesque experience than witnessing a performance of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome translated and adapted for the opera stage by Hermann Lachmann and set to music by Richard Strauss. Wilde’s decadentist retelling of the biblical tale takes no prisoners, rejoicing in hedonism, passion, corruption and depravity, pouring over with lust, guts and gore. Similarly, Strauss’s score is relentless in its fin-de-siècle, over-ripe Romanticism; its raw, wriggling lasciviousness; its constant, compulsive excessiveness.Read full review... | |
| 24-May-2012 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Nina Stemme comes out ahead in Cleveland Orchestra's Salome |
 “When I looked at you, I heard secret music,” says Salome in her monologue to the severed head of John the Baptist. Richard Strauss’s opera trades in the unseeable and the unknowable—from the range of metaphors applied to the moon to the nearly impossible staging of a ten-minute striptease performed by a dramatic soprano—which makes it unusually well suited to concert presentation. Strauss’ high-octane, atmospheric music can seem all the more lurid and mysterious when its subjective visualization is left to the imagination.Read full review... | |
