Sunday, July 27, 2025
Großes Festspielhaus, Salzburg, Austria
This novel coupling fed a blockbuster Sunday matinee, a powerful theatrical concert for what appeared to be a large audience denying the Sabbath. Those who did not can catch this rare pairing tomorrow night, same venue.
For Oedipus Rex, Christoph Waltz narrated the events factually (in German, Latin originally, and sung in that language), libretto by Cocteau after Sophocles’s narrative, Esa-Pekka Salonen drawing lusty orchestral and (men’s voices) choral contributions, dramatic, detail squeezed out, counterpoint important, Allan Clayton sympathetic to the titular character, and us in turn, the work, here leaning more to oratorio, clearly arriving at significant peaks, Salonen finding an expressive heart in this objective (monumental) setting, and sidestepping a break between Acts, if with Marina Viotti adding unrestrained intensity, and no lack of choral akin-to football-crowd chants, unapologetically syncopated. Tragedy is the end result, an emotional void apparent here, silent darkness.
The opium-induced adventures in Berlioz’s fantastique were a 40:60 mix of symphonism (if not extending to repeats in i & iv) and flexible storytelling, vividly alive (reveries to the fore from the off, although violin pizzicatos weren’t always unanimous), the second-movement waltz charged beyond the ballroom (if with the detracting ad lib cornet part), the ensuing ‘trip’ to the country spaciously serene before seamlessly developing passions and cueing threatening timpani thunder, ripe for the scaffold, swaggered to here if with a curious broadening of pace for a few bars. For their Sabbath the Witches piled on the hedonism and danced to the ‘Dies irae’, Salonen accelerating gleefully into the final page; enthusiastic response from orchestra and then audience.
Decent Austrian Radio sound if dynamically restricted.
***
Wiener Philharmoniker, Dirigent: Esa-Pekka Salonen
Wiener Singverein (men)
Christoph Waltz, Sprecher; Allan Clayton, Oedipus; Marina Viotti, Jokaste; Michael Volle, Kreon/Bote; Albert Dohmen, Teiresias.
Igor Strawinsky: Oedipus Rex – Opern-Oratorium in zwei Akten
Hector Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_rex_(opera)