When I reviewed the most recent version of Elektra in July last year I singled out for special praise the way in which Barenboim and the recording allowed us to hear so much of the detail of this highly coloured and frenetic score. Sinopoli and the DG team have gone even further in exposing the panoply of sound Strauss conjured from his vast orchestra in the most vivid sound yet. But there’s a downside to this big-scale performance and recording. The orchestra are so upfront, so fond of saying, as it were, ‘look what wonders we’re achieving’, that the voices tend to get lost in the melee.
This attitude is also indicative of Sinopoli’s reading, impassioned to the point of neurosis and favouring extreme contrasts of tempos, particularly slow ones. In his much-admired Salome, also on DG (9/91), he managed to control structure even when going to extremes. Here I am not so sure. Although there are moments when the piece seems more sensuous than ever before, especially in the pre-echoes of Rosenkavalier in the Aegisth scene, too often the score seems broken into its component sections, wanting an overall view and, in such passages as the Recognition Scene, the music is becalmed at Sinopoli’s chosen speed. If you – and your neighbours – can tolerate the overbearing recording and Sinopoli’s extreme reading, you will certainly find much here to thrill mind and heart. Solti (with an earlier VPO on as convincing form as its successor for Sinopoli), even more Bohm (whose 37-year-old recording sounds much more naturally balanced than the new one!), working with the Dresden Staatskapelle as the most idiomatic of Strauss orchestras, create tension without resort to exaggeration.
Marc has swiftly graduated from Chrysothemis, which she undertook for Barenboim, to the title-role, which she sings with depth of feeling and warm tone and often well-moulded phrasing, especially affecting in her relief at her brother’s tardy return, but as in the lesser role her diction is often occluded and the top of her voice comes under strain. It is a worthy stab at the part, but hardly in the class of Polaski for Barenboim, let alone – in their different, highly individual ways – Nilsson (Solti), Behrens (Ozawa) or Borkh (Bohm). Voigt brings involvement and a basically sympathetic voice to bear on the frustrated emotions of Chrysothemis, but comes nowhere near the class of Sawallisch’s Studer in terms of etching the text and its meaning into the listener’s mind.
Klytemnestra is a role in which few mezzos fail yet there are gradations of success. Meier’s vocal and dramatic understanding for Barenboim was outstanding; Ludwig (Ozawa) is commanding and queenly (almost too much so); Madeira for Bohm is, if possible, even more incisive and crazed without going over the top as Solti’s Resnik is inclined to do. Schwarz sings with exemplary accuracy and conjures up much of the weird, nightmarish connotations of the part without quite erasing memories of her predecessors.
By chance I had failed to check at the start who had been cast as Orestes. The voice sounded familiar but in unsteady state. Eventually, recognizing Ramey, I was distressed at the extent that his vibrato had loosened: the last thing one wants is a wobbly avenger. Isn’t this just one more case of a major company casting a role on the fame of the singer rather than on his experience or otherwise in the part? Barenboim’s Struckmann is no great shakes but Krause (Solti), Weikl (Sawallisch) and, best of all, Fischer-Dieskau (Bohm) supply the sturdy baritone and interior meaning demanded by this short part. Jerusalem is classy casting for Aegisthus, but somehow his measured singing misses something of the ridiculous, rather nasty profile the role should have and many of his forerunners have provided.
In sum, then, this isn’t a set to trouble the hegemony of the previous favourites. It is undeniably exciting – one is easily seduced by the sheer brilliance of the sound – but Elektra is about inner psychology more than extrovert effect. It fails by the side of the Bohm, its DG rival: as both exercise the option, sanctioned by the composer, to make the ‘theatre’ cuts, the Bohm, so wonderfully recorded all those years ago with a magnificent cast, at mid price wins that battle. If you must have a 1990s version, go for Barenboim, who has a deeper understanding of the piece than Sinopoli. If you want the work complete – and on disc, why not? – you have to choose as before between Solti’s histrionic drive and Sawallisch’s more measured and more (too?) temperately recorded interpretation.'