Janice Baird News Neuigkeiten

Sober Take on a Savage Opera
‘I have learned many of the gestures I use in Elektra in a sanatorium for the insane,’ said Belgian soprano Mariette Mazarin in 1910, revealing the depth of her preparation for the role after a shattering American premiere at which she fainted during the curtain call.
Perhaps singers have developed stronger nerves since. Last Friday’s performance of Elektra at the Esplanade Concert Hall with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra never reached such peaks of manic intensity. Instead, guest conductor Kent Nagano, music director of the Bavarian State Opera, gave a lyrical yet moving performance in which all the singers, bar none, could be heard, a rarity in this most dissonant of Richard Strauss’s operas.
From the opening bars , Agamemnon’s motif, blasted by the brass , to the final, feverish dance of death, Nagano was in full control, emphasising sensitivity and colour over mere volume, never succumbing to the temptation to treat it as an exercise in clanging modernism. It was a restrained and nimble performance, yet explosive when called for.
The Elektra for the night, American Janice Baird, complemented his approach. Baird wasn’t a madwoman or a deranged axe,murderer. She sang simply as a woman pulled to emotional extremes by denial , of her desire for revenge, of reunion with her brother, Orestes.
In the scenes with her sister, Chrysothemis, intelligently sung by Dagmar Hesse, she was sensitive and pleading, never histrionic or neurotic. Her tone was full and plaintive through its considerable range, and cut through the 100,strong orchestra at will, every blast into the higher registers taut and crisp, but when needed, she could take it down into a sensuous whisper.
Her Orestes was 32,year,old Russian bass Alexander Vinogradov, already a successful Pimen and Colline in some of the biggest houses, and who brought a firm, black tone to the role. Singing Klytemnestra was Swedish mezzo Susanne Resmark, who impressed with her bell,like lower range and commanding stage presence. Richard Decker, an accomplished Tristan, was luxury casting as the hapless King Aegisth, though his tone was just too orotund for ‘a woman who performs manly deeds only in camera’.
The only drawback was the English surtitles, which were seldom grammatical and never poetic.
This savage, mad, intermittently brilliant opera is perhaps not the best choice for a 30th anniversary gala, and one wonders what the many children who attended thought of it (admittedly, it is 100 years to the month since its premiere in Dresden in 1909).
But it was a great coup. Baird, among the top Elektras today, is due for three performances in Berlin later this month. Nagano is himself conducting the work with his home Munich forces later this season. Singapore was possibly a convenient stopover, but opera goers here would never have cared.