Strauss’s “Salome” begins with a swiftly slithering clarinet flourish, like a snake darting into the undergrowth almost before you see it. The passage is over in a couple of seconds, but it sets the stage for what’s to come: sinuous, nocturnal, elusive.
This germ of music ends up infecting one of the sickliest scores in opera: a 1905 one-act setting of Oscar Wilde’s languorously decadent, gleefully fetid fin-de-siècle play about a society slow-dancing toward self-destruction.
It’s obvious, then, where Heartbeat Opera got the batty, witty idea of doing the work almost only with clarinets. The vividly unvarnished results, which opened on Thursday at the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, may be the most implausible yet of this feisty company’s chamber-scale takes on the classics.
Heartbeat’s productions don’t reduce canonical compositions so much as reinvent them, with orchestras that could fit around a dining table. Over the past decade, it has given us a six-instrument “Madama Butterfly” and a jazz-infused “Carmen,” both trimmed to an hour and a half. Beethoven’s “Fidelio” was pared to two pianos, two cellos, two horns and percussion.
But even compressing the grandeur of “Tosca” to a few cellos, bass, piano, flute, trumpet and horn isn’t as out-there as imagining “Salome” for an octet of clarinetists. (To be precise, those eight musicians play a total of 28 instruments, including a handful of saxophones, and they’re buttressed by two busy percussionists.)
The concept is radical because Strauss’s breakthrough opera is defined like few others by the expressionistic power of its huge orchestra. The score’s brilliance, though, lies in a paradox: For much of the piece, the sprawling forces are meant to sound seductively diaphanous, a Mack truck navigating curves with eerily catlike grace.
If it’s sheer numbers you’re looking for, the Metropolitan Opera is presenting a new, full-scale production of “Salome” this spring. We go to Heartbeat, though, to be mere feet from the performers, with stagings that lucidly connect chestnuts to contemporary issues: Black Lives Matter, unjust incarceration, gun violence, racial stereotyping.
Moreover, in Daniel Schlosberg we trust. He is the musical mastermind behind Heartbeat’s daring arrangements, and his work is always intriguing — even if this clarinet-orgy “Salome” is an orchestration I admired more than adored. While this was a Strauss drained of much of his kaleidoscope of jeweled colors, Schlosberg’s instrumentation, conducted by Jacob Ashworth, did bring out a dusky liquidity in the piece, stabbed by wails and squeaks. Playing en masse, the ensemble could achieve organlike saturation.
Presented in the intimate surroundings of the Space at Irondale, with the performers exposed between two blocks of seating, the queasy-making story unfolded with raw clarity, though in a stiff English translation. John the Baptist (the opera’s Jochanaan) is being held captive in the palace of Herod in ancient Judea, and Herod’s teenage stepdaughter, Salome, becomes obsessed with him. Herod, who’s in love with her, promises her anything she wants in exchange for a dance; she obliges, then demands John’s head, which she kisses in an ecstatic final monologue.
In Elizabeth Dinkova’s Heartbeat staging, the palace is a spare and seedy space in the present day, with dirty walls and beat-up office furniture. At one end is a bank of screens bringing in surveillance images from the property, including a snippet of an otherwise cut scene in which a group of Jews bicker over theology. John the Baptist (the baritone Nathaniel Sullivan, somber and appropriately a bit deranged) is being kept not out of sight, down in the libretto’s cistern, but in a clear-walled cell onstage.
Strauss envisioned his title character as “a 16-year-old princess with the voice of an Isolde,” and Dinkova and the soprano Summer Hassan have doubled down on Salome’s youth. She’s dressed in a billowing pink tulle skirt and sneakers, with an affect of cheerful purity in unnerving tension with the focused strength of Hassan’s voice.
The lurid Dance of the Seven Veils here begins as very much a young girl’s awkward shimmying before smartly reversing the standard power dynamics: Herod (sung by the tenor Patrick Cook with unusual sweetness) undresses for Salome, rather than vice versa. Played for laughs, this silly start shifts into an abusive sequence that’s intense enough for it to feel plausible, even understandable, when Salome coldly insists on John’s head.
Using the English translation seems misguided, and Schlosberg’s ambitious arrangement ends up sounding a bit thin. But with committed performances and visceral direction, this “Salome” has the scrappy vitality that has made Heartbeat invaluable.
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