Marking the centenary of its founding by Strauss, Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt, last year’s Salzburg Festival went ahead with a reduced programme, thanks in no small measure to fierce determination on the part of its management, rigorous Covid testing for performers and strict social distancing among audiences. There were only two operas: Così fan tutte, directed by Christof Loy in the Grosses Festspielhaus (Mark Pullinger reviewed the DVD in the June issue of Gramophone), and Krzysztof Warlikowski’s formidable new staging of Elektra in the Felsenreitschule, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, with the Lithuanian soprano Aušrinė Stundytė in the title-role.

Warlikowski hauls the opera forwards into an unspecified period after the Second World War, where we find Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s Klytemnestra and her cronies dressed in designer chic: Stundytė wears a faded party dress, while Asmik Grigorian’s Chrysothemis swivels about in stiletto heels and a two-piece outfit in shiny pink leather. The set suggests a bathhouse complete with showers and a shallow pool, through which Agamemnon’s ghost wades during Elektra’s opening monologue, and in which all the protagonists, Michael Laurenz’s smug Aegisthus apart, wash their hands in vain gestures of purification. The interior of a glasshouse in the royal palace, meanwhile, is intermittently illuminated by Felice Ross’s complex lighting plot, allowing us to see both Klytemnestra presiding over human sacrifices and the aftermath of the murders, horribly displayed towards the close.

Warlikowski sometimes takes liberties. Strauss and Hofmannsthal mention neither Iphigenia, whose sacrifice by Agamemnon at Aulis prompted the classical Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband, nor indeed Orestes’ subsequent persecution by the Furies for matricide. Warlikowski, however, restores both. Clytemnestra’s speech of self-justification from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, delivered with fierce intensity by Baumgartner, is added as a prologue. At the end, Warlikowski invokes Les Mouches, Sartre’s very different, existentialist version of the narrative, as chilling onstage videos (by Kamil Polak) show swarms of flies, Sartre’s Furies, swirling round pooled blood as Derek Welton’s Orestes flees in terror from the stage into the auditorium.

At the centre of this unsettling, eclectic vision is Stundytė’s brooding, grieving Elektra, a towering performance both vocally and dramatically. Her tone is beautiful and engulfing, reminiscent at times of Leonie Rysanek (in Götz Friedrich’s film) or Inge Borkh (with Böhm, 11/94, or Dimitri Mitropoulos, 8/98), so the great outpourings of the Recognition scene and finale are overwhelming in their ecstatic lyricism and elation. Yet we’re aware throughout both of the glint of obsession in her voice and eyes, and the disquieting way she etches and spits out the text with unnerving vehemence. The detailed subtlety of her acting, captured, often in remorseless close-up, by Myriam Hoyer’s camerawork, allows every emotional and psychological shift to register: we know exactly what is going on in her mind and soul, even in moments of quiet stillness.

We find similar subtleties and complexities elsewhere, though Warlikowski’s occasional idiosyncrasies can get in the way. Baumgartner is a terrifying Klytemnestra, though any sympathies we may have with her at the start (and we do) are dispelled half an hour later when we find her fiddling around with the contents of a bucket of human entrails. Grigorian sounds rapturously beautiful and wonderfully assured but makes a cooler Chrysothemis than many, gradually drawn into complicity with the violence that surrounds her, rather than a desperate observer. Welton’s Orestes, weighed down by the monstrous burden of responsibility he bears, can be extraordinarily moving, while Laurenz, elegant, vapid and betraying a sexual interest not only in Klytemnestra but also in her daughters, is the nastiest Aegisthus imaginable. In the pit, Welser-Möst shapes the score with slow, inexorable detail, gradually ratcheting up the tension to almost unbearable levels by the end. The playing, as one might expect, is matchless. Despite its eccentricities, I found the whole thing utterly compelling. Highly recommended.