Opéra de Montréal gave that city's first staging of Elektra in November--and the first production ever by a resident Montreal company--finessing a presentation both stark and expansive, starring the brilliant American soprano Lise Lindstrom. Filling the titular role, Lindstrom easily carried the weight of Strauss' demanding single-act, 100-minute opera. But the spotlight wasn't hers alone; she shared it with a massive, 25-foot statue of King Agamemnon and the equally enormous vision of the company's artistic director, Michel Beaulac.
Dressed in trousers and a work shirt, Lindstrom made Strauss' endlessly long lines seem effortless, filling the large hall with no sign of pushing or forcing her voice, something many of the other performers had trouble doing. Those voices, buried under the heft of Strauss' orchestration, dampened the opening scenes. Of course, that made Elektra's own cries of loss and heartache all the more wrenching.
Perched atop a library ladder, not quite hallway-up her hulking father figure, Lindstrom's voice broke from her character's emotion, showing neither strain nor losing pitch.
Elektra hasn't always worked on so grand a scale. Well, at least not visibly so. But her part in Strauss' opera has dominated for close to a century.
Famously, Strauss' librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, cut the ancient story to focus on Elektra, herself, for their 1909 opera, in the process, creating a role that truly needs to be conquered. It was unlikely intentional, but notable nonetheless, that only Elektra's siblings Chrysothemis (Nicola Beller Carbone, soprano) and Orest managed to project over the full orchestra (albeit not with Lindstrom's naturalness). Such is not a criticism of the rest of the cast, so much as it remains a lauding of Lindstrom's remarkable instrument.
When she finally intoned "we who accomplish, we are the gods,” Elektra-cum-Lindstrom claimed an inheritance of the late Agamemnon's stature.
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