RICHARD STRAUSS

Elektra

 

Alessandra Marc - Elektra

Deborah Voigt - Chrysothemis

Hanna Schwarz - Klytamnestra

Samual Ramey - Orest

Siegfried Jerusalem - Aegist

Konzertvereinigung Wiener

Staatsopenchor

Wiener Philharmoniker / Giuseppe Sinopoli

 

Sinopoli and the [engineers] have gone even further (than Barenboim/Teldec) in exposing the panoply of sound Strauss conjured from his vast orchestra in the most vivid sound yet…you will certainly find much here to thrill mind and heart.

Gramophone 1997

 

Elektra was the first of the collaborative fruits of Strauss and his long-term librettist Hugo von Hoffmanstahl. The work was premiered in Dresden in 1909, and the libretto caused much consternation among critics and public alike, being called immoral and perverse. However, the critics evidently didn’t know their Sophocles well, for Hoffmanstahl had adhered closely to the original – which he knew well in the original Greek. Although it was their first collaboration, Strauss had reservations about setting the libretto – not for any reasons to do with the criticism it drew after the premier, but due to the fact that Elektra has close parallels with Salome. For example, Elektra herself with the character of Salome, and between Orest and Jokanaan. Both works have scores requiring vast orchestral forces, and Elektra

pushes tonality to breaking point.

 

The tension created by Strauss is almost unbearable at times. That said, Elektra is a less daring score than Salome, and the composer had begun to row back from the edge of tonality and the world that Schoenberg would shortly inhabit.  This journey back from the fringes of tonality would triumph with the gloriously sumptuous Der Rosenkavalier.

 

Brilliant Classics 2cds 9153