Antonio Pappano never conducted Salome while he was music director at Covent Garden, but he has now turned to Strauss’s opera for the final concerts of his opening season with the London Symphony Orchestra, assembling, in the process, one of the finest casts you could ever hope to hear in the work, and presenting us with an interpretation at once decadent, beautiful, engulfing, and frankly little short of astonishing.
Gabriel Fauré once dubbed the score a “symphonic poem with voices added”, which is not an entirely accurate description, given the power and psychological insight of Strauss’s vocal writing, but does emphasise the centrality of the orchestra’s role in carrying the dramatic and emotional intensity. With the LSO on tremendous form, Pappano lets the music unfurl in a single unbroken arc of gathering tension from the slithery, lubricious clarinet solo with which it opens to the savagery of the ending, and every flicker of detail and colour in Strauss’s orchestration hits home. Strings sound palpably sensual, woodwind by turns exquisite and edgy, the brass associated with Jochanaan infinitely noble as it intrudes on the prevailing mood of feverish eroticism. The overall effect is of great beauty slowly turning monstrous, obscene, and rotten with decay.
