I enjoyed, if that is the right word for Elektra’s gruesome drama, this performance of Strauss’s opera (taken from the first night of a new production at the Vienna State Opera in 1989), still one of the most sensational scores of the last century, even more than when I reviewed it in its laserdisc incarnation seven years ago, not least because of Harry Kupfer’s superlative direction. He may have conceived the work in even more lurid terms than its creators Hofmannsthal and Strauss intended, but the principals’ psychotic behaviour is so convincingly enacted that we are carried into the soul of all their personal tortures of the mind. Elektra herself is a determined, raddled, single-minded harridan, lording it over sister and mother, a portrayal Eva Marton carries out with a deal of conviction, once one accepts the judder in her voice. Chrysothemis becomes a writhing, overwrought, frustrated figure, at one stage seeming to fake an orgasm, all of which Studer conveys with much emphasis on physical contact with her sister. She sings the taxing role with opulent tone and soaring phraseology.
Physicality is also of the essence in Fassbaender’s study of guilt and inner disintegration as a Klytemnestra of intriguing complexity, yet she still somehow manages to suggest the character’s feminine attraction. This portrayal alone makes this DVD essential viewing. Grundheber is the avenging Orestes to the life, with savagely piercing eyes and implacable tone. King is a properly futile paramour. In the activity of the extras, and such episodes as the butchering of Aegisthus and Chrysothemis wallowing in his blood-stained cloak, very little is left to the imagination. This is an enclosed world where licence and human sacrifices, unbridled in their ferocity, have taken over from order and humanity, and that was surely Kupfer’s intention, so that Orestes’ arrival has even more of a cleansing effect than usual.
In the pit, Abbado conducts with a single-minded intensity, constantly aware of the score’s brutal and tragic aspects, and he procures playing of tremendous concentration from the Vienna Philharmonic. Although the staging takes place in Stygian gloom you can discern more of its detail in this reincarnation on DVD, which has the added advantage of containing the whole opera on a single disc.
The booklet is exemplary in giving the necessary information on work and performance, but, unfortunately, the numbering of the tracks is throughout one step behind what is offered on screen. But, unless and until the Decca Friedrich/Bohm version reaches DVD, this is a version to buy for its absorbing, fully integrated view of Strauss’s masterpiece.'