Review: Two Sopranos Make an ‘Elektra’ Both Mythic and Human

Behind the wonderful extra of Strauss’s “Elektra” — the libretto’s mythic setting, the rating’s unsparing terror — is one thing smaller: a starkly framed household portrait, albeit one knocked off the wall and scratched up by shards of shattered glass.

That has at all times been on the core of Patrice Chéreau’s manufacturing, which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night time. However on this revival, you would residence in even nearer to only its two sisters, antipodal soprano roles sung by Nina Stemme and Lise Davidsen with floodlight luminosity and painfully human sensitivity.

Chéreau’s staging, which premiered on the Aix-en-Provence Competition in 2013 earlier than coming to the Met six years in the past, doesn’t appear to have aged a day. And it’s tough to think about that occuring quickly with a placeless manufacturing that fits the timelessness Sophocles’ traditional tragedy — which Hugo von Hofmannsthal tailored right into a play for the age of Freud, then right into a libretto for Strauss’s opera.

The set, by Richard Peduzzi, is the grand and extreme courtyard of the vaguely Mediterranean residence of a vaguely elite household in vaguely modern costume (designed by Caroline de Vivaise). The place the manufacturing will get extra particular is in its departures from the libretto: its absence of caricature and villainy, its climactic dance of loss of life as an alternative a scene of stillness and life persevering with in agony. Largely cold the place it might be a bloodbath, it’s a examine of a household irreparably fractured by trauma.

This idea calls for singers who can actually act. And Stemme rises to satisfy it, if not at all times in voice then in dramatic depth, which has solely grown since she sang the title position within the Chéreau manufacturing’s first outing on the Met. She isn’t at relaxation: rocking as she stares straight forward, her eyes extensive open with laser concentrate on avenging her father, Agamemnon.

When Stemme sang of his loss of life — a homicide dedicated by Elektra’s mom, Klytämnestra, and her lover, Aegisth — her voice didn’t at all times cooperate, particularly on the low finish of her vary. At instances she visibly braced herself for the position’s most punishing outbursts. But she delivered them as if with dragon’s breath, matched solely by passages of aching delicacy.

Davidsen, as Elektra’s sister Chrysothemis, gave her greatest efficiency on the Met this season — in a position to present a fuller vary than in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” final fall, and extra in command of her immense instrument than throughout a current run of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and a profit live performance for Ukraine, wherein she sang that composer’s “4 Final Songs.” Sometimes a greater actor by her voice than her physicality, right here she carried as a lot character on her sorrowful face as Stemme did in her eyes.

Relaying the information that her brother, Orest, had died, “thrown and trampled by his personal horses,” Davidsen set free a chilling wail — not for the final time within the night. Initially educated as a mezzo-soprano, she has a full-bodied decrease vary that’s simply as thrilling to witness as her candescent excessive notes, and a commanding softness in additional conversational moments.

She and Stemme had been supported all through by a Met Orchestra in glorious kind beneath the baton of Donald Runnicles, whose studying of the rating was sensitively aligned with that of Chéreau. The opera has sounded scarier and extra chaotic — its blood bathtub met with bombast in lots of interpretations — however Runnicles insisted on the potential of dramatic momentum at a extra restrained scale. And the night was no much less thrilling for it; if something, it was riveting in its revelatory transparency, the layers of expressionistic coloration, sweetness and Wagnerian abundance stacking in counterpoint or weaving out and in of each other with grace.

There have been standouts elsewhere — Hei-Kyung Hong as an authoritative and rending Fifth Maid — but additionally lapses among the many principals. Michaela Schuster’s Klytämnestra was certainly one of apparent gestures and a strained voice, which she often sought to salvage with near-Sprechstimme declamation. Chéreau’s manufacturing hinges on a sympathetic Klytämnestra; she didn’t fairly obtain that. And males had been shadows of their previous appearances. Greer Grimsley’s resonant bass-baritone was right here light and effortful, and never at all times straightforward to observe. As Aegisth, Stefan Vinke was barely audible — an upsetting flip for a tenor who has sung roles like Siegfried, maybe barking however not less than with penetrating energy.

You couldn’t assist however really feel unhealthy each time they sang alongside one of many starring sisters. Which is at all times: Stemme by no means leaves the stage. It’s, in spite of everything, her present — and, for this run, Davidsen’s, too.

Elektra

By April 20 on the Metropolitan Opera; metopera.org.