Never-ending cycle of obsessive revenge

Elizabeth Connell, Australian mezzo soprano. Photo / Clive Barda.

Fired by the 1909 success of their opera Elektra at La Scala, Richard Strauss wrote to librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal that he felt he had turned a corner.

Yet others were not so convinced. In its time, Elektra was one of the famously mocked monuments of the new music. George Bernard Shaw put its faults down to the "besetting sin of Teutonic overstatement", while a contemporary American critic likened it to poking a stick in an ant hill and watching the insects "darting, angry and bewildered, biting and clawing, in a thousand directions at once".

History has proved both judgments seriously misguided and, next Friday, the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra gives us the opportunity to experience this extraordinary work in its Westpac Opera in Concert.

Conductor Eckehard Stier, who thrilled Aucklanders in 2008 with Strauss' previous opera, Salome, talks of it as being "what we would describe in Germany as the big hammer - incredibly exciting music dealing out all different kinds of emotion ... with the fantastic acoustic in the town hall, there will be fire in the air!"

Expect the ultimate in excitement then, especially with the title character who, in the words of American wit Ethan Mordden, is nothing less than demented.

Yet the distinguished soprano Elizabeth Connell is disarmingly cheery about playing the lady in question. "If you've ever had any issues with your mother," she confides, "this is the opera to get them out in public and get paid for it."

Elektra can be summed up as someone who is "totally obsessed with vengeance and, when that is fulfilled, has nothing more to live for ... and that's why she dies basically. One wrong makes another wrong which makes another and the cycle never breaks until everyone's dead."

Although Connell has played the role on stage many times, most recently last year at Las Palmas Opera Festival, she feels it comes over well in concert. "You may not have costumes or lighting and the orchestra isn't underneath you, but otherwise you are in the bubble doing what you have to do, putting it across. You could be on a mountain or at the bottom of the ocean, you're concentrating on what you're doing.

"You don't have to think whether you have to go left here, or right there, or pick up this or that. You just have to concentrate on singing and do a jolly nice job."

She reminds me of the demands that Strauss makes on his singers by recalling the anecdote of him asking the orchestra to play louder because he could still hear the singer, in this case mezzo Ernestine von Schumann-Heink.

"It's probably apocryphal," Connell laughs. "There are a few difficult places but mostly Strauss has been very clever and allowed you to come across in everything he wants."

Schumann-Heink felt that the role represents the farthest Strauss could go without deserting tonality forever and Connell admits it is one of her biggest challenges. And as for venturing beyond Elektra, this soprano has a confession. "In the times when I did more modern music, I once learnt and sang Schoenberg's Erwartung ... and then put it away so at least I can say I've done it. I'll leave it to those who find it easier than I do."

Connell made a huge impact on our young singers when she judged the Lexus Song Quest three years ago and speaks fondly of New Zealanders whom she regularly sees at London's National Opera Studio.

Also in the cast are Erika Sunnegardh as Chrysothemis, Helen Medlyn as Clytemnestra, Finnish bass-baritone Tuomas Pursio as Orestes and Richard Greager as Aegisthus.

PERFORMANCE

What: Elektra, with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra

Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Friday at 7.30pm

- NZ Herald