Elektra

This 2010 Salzburg Festival performance of Richard Strauss's intense one-act opera is an excellent mounting of the 1909 piece based on Sophocles' tragedy about the tortured titular woman who drove her brother Orest to kill their mother, Klytämnestra, and her lover, Aegisth, because the pair had murdered Elektra's father, Agamemnon, after his return from the Trojan War. The vocalism is superb, with Iréne Theorin standing out as Elektra and equally strong work from Waltraud Meier (Klytämnestra), Eva-Maria Westbroek (Elektra's sister, Chrysothemis), Robert Gambill (Aegisth), and René Pape (Orest). While Daniele Gatti doesn't bring out the fierceness of the music to the degree that some conductors do, he elicits solid playing from a softer-toned Vienna Philharmonic that reveals the subtlety of Strauss's orchestration. More traditionally minded viewers may be put off by the modern costumes, but otherwise Nikolaus Lehnhoff's staging is beyond reproach, with the abstract set's dark tones and stark architecture lending an appropriate sense of foreboding to the doom-laden story. While there is formidable competition from previous releases, including the 2010 Thielemann staging from Baden-Baden (VL-3/11), this Blu-ray edition is bargain-priced and includes more than two hours of excerpts from other ArtHaus Musik titles. Presented in DTS-HD 5.1 and PCM stereo, this is highly recommended. (F. Swietek)