Before I wrote the first word in this text, I’ve really had to ponder a lot about my impressions of this evening. When I thought that I could have been in Trogen listening to Bach rather than here watching a staging that could be described as “embarrassing”, it was hard to be objective.
There are many productions of Salome that turn around about child abuse, but I have never thought I would see one that made people laugh, as this evening with Claus Guth’s, first seen in the Deutsche Oper in 2016. You know when a comedy movie has a scene when someone takes a character to the theatre to see “intellectually profound” staging and the whole thing is a joke? Here we have it all – the spotlighting against a dark background with characters moving like zombies, shopwindow mannequins being beheaded, lots of extras doing the same character, the whole textbook of eurotrash used without looking back. Herod is a high-profile tailor – there are suits and neckties everywhere, Salome fantasizes about a Jochanaan who is a a doppelgänger of her stepfather, momma dresses like Cruella DeVil and looks the other way and, in the end, when Salome has had her little bourgeois catharsis with grand orchestra and tons of Leitmotifs, she gets her overcoat and leaves.
Anyone willing to perform in a nonsense-fest like that deserves praises, but the truth is that no one in the cast had their moment of glory this evening. If Vida Mikneviciute (Salome) sang smoothly and without any sign of fatigue in a role evidently heavy for her voice, she sounded small-scaled, fluttery, often colorless and not faultless in terms of intonation. Jordan Shanahan’s bass baritone is three sizes smaller than the the part, and his darkened vowels did not help a lot in terms of projection. The tone itself is apt for the role and he is definitely is a trouper in his disposition of running to and fro in his underwear while trying to pierce through the orchestra. If Thomas Blondelle’s attempt of producing heroic high notes often resulted a greyish sound and his acting had more than a splash of exaggeration, his Herod brought variety and animation to a show dismal by definition.
It is difficult to assess Axel Kober’s conducting this evenings, for he was too busy in his traffic cop duties of reining the orchestra in so that his light-voices cast could be heard at all, while trying to preserve the torso of this score’s structure. Luckily, the Deutsche Oper Orchestra was able to retain some tonal refulgente in those circumstances, and this alone made the experience less of a disappointment.
I HEAR VOICES 
Vida Mikneviciute is one of the reasons I’ve stayed away from Berlin for awhile.
Hello, Jerold! I would like to hear her not overparted some dar to know how she actually sounds. I find the stamina and the cold blood admirable, I must say.