Salomé (Concert Version)

In brief:

There is always something slightly wistful about hearing an opera in concert. Without scenery, costumes, lighting, movement and the dangerous physical proximity of a fully staged production, opera can feel as though it has been asked to perform with one hand tied behind its back. Forget the Dance of the Seven Veils. It's a bit like having sex with your clothes on.

Yet last night's concert performance of Richard Strauss's Salomé at Teatru Manoel proved that a concert setting offers its own rare privilege: the chance to listen into the score itself, to hear Strauss's extraordinary orchestral imagination with unusual clarity, and for the brain and ears to follow the opera's psychological machinery without the eyes' distraction. It was also the platform for a simply outstanding performance from Netta Or in the title role. She certainly blew my socks off.

In detail:

Last night, Teatru Manoel presented *Salomé* in Nigel Shore's reduced orchestration, with guest conductor Barry Kolman leading Netta Or as Salomé, Joseph Lia as Jochanaan, Eduardo Hurtado Rampoldi as Herod and Graziella De Battista as Herodias.

Netta Or's Salomé was the evening's revelation. This is one of the most punishing roles in the soprano repertoire: it demands power, stamina, metallic brilliance, sensuality and an almost frightening emotional commitment. Or possessed all of these. Her voice had both beauty and edge, capable of lyrical softness in Salomé's more vulnerable moments but opening into a huge, gleaming sound when the character's obsession took full control.

What made her performance so compelling was not simply the scale of her voice, but its specificity. She made Salomé neither a mere femme fatale nor a conventional villain, but a young woman intoxicated by power, desire and religious taboo. Her final monologue over Jochanaan's severed head was extraordinary: controlled, rapturous and deeply unsettling. It was a performance of real operatic stature, and she dominated the stage.

Joseph Lia's Jochanaan brought gravitas and vocal authority to the prophet, while Eduardo Hurtado Rampoldi's Herod was vividly characterised: nervous, volatile, sensual and increasingly frightened. He captured the king's instability without reducing him to caricature. Graziella De Battista's Herodias was equally strong, giving the role acid wit, imperial disdain and a convincing sense of danger.

Together, the four singers created a convincing dramatic world even without staging. Netta at least had the wild look of a young woman in the midst of a nervous breakdown.

Sex with our clothes on

But what is lost in a concert performance is obvious. The opera, composed in 1905, adapts Oscar Wilde's French play into a feverish one-act study of desire, religious fanaticism, political cruelty and death. *Salomé* is not merely a score with words attached; it is an opera built from gesture, gaze and physical transgression. Salomé's fixation on Jochanaan, Herod's uneasy lechery, Herodias's venomous watchfulness, and the final kiss all acquire part of their power from the body. In a staged performance, the audience watches desire become visible. In concert, it must be imagined.

But the gain is equally real. Freed from the need to track movement across a stage, one could attend to Strauss's orchestral writing with almost forensic attention. This is music in which the orchestra does not merely accompany the singers; it frequently knows what they want before they do. It is a vast, glittering, unstable organism: sensuous one moment, brutal the next, capable of suggesting both the perfume of Herod's court and the stench of the cistern below.

The reduced orchestration was a sensible practical solution for Teatru Manoel's historic auditorium, but it did not diminish the score's impact. If anything, it made the instrumental lines more immediate. One heard the opera not as a wall of late-Romantic sound, but as a succession of vivid musical personalities.

The orchestra's voices

The strings, led by Matteo Colombo, carried much of the opera's nervous atmosphere. Their sustained lines gave the music its uneasy, shimmering surface, while the lower strings supplied the dark, coiling energy beneath Herod's court. Violinists Vincenzo Picone, Mariana Rotaru, Klara Nazaj, Emilia Wisniewska and Angelo Gagnoli all played their role.

In the opening scenes, the strings seemed to breathe with Salomé herself: restless, sensuous, unable to settle. Violas were important throughout thanks to Alveen Schembri-Gallagher and Elni Gori. And the cellists – Akos Kortesz, Yaro Miklukho, Desiree Calleja and Isabel Anaya Herrera – sustained some of the greatest musical leaps.

The woodwinds were the opera's most expressive commentators. The oboe (Chiara Elsa Telleri) and cor anglais (Jennifer Melville) brought a bitter, orientalist colouring to the score, while the clarinets (Nelly Rodriguez and Javier Zamora Morano) moved between languid sensuality and sharp psychological unease. The flute (Fiorella Camilleri), particularly in the celebrated Dance of the Seven Veils, added a glittering, almost delirious brilliance. Giacomo Cella on the bassoon, meanwhile, gave the music its sinister undertow, suggesting the darkness of the cistern and the grotesque comedy of Herod's court.

The brass supplied the opera's power and menace. The horns, Edoardo Nicosia and Joele Lombardo, had a noble but unstable presence, capable of suggesting both ceremonial grandeur and imminent violence. Joseph Chircop on the trumpet cut through the texture with imperious brilliance, while Emmanuel Giordimania's trombone gave the score its weight, especially in the moments when the opera's erotic tension tipped into brutality.

Percussion and timpani were equally important: Kristian Schembri, Kurt Calleja and Joseph Camillieri (Snr). They did not simply mark rhythm; they gave the performance its pulse of dread. Every crescendo seemed to carry the threat of violence, and the final scenes benefited enormously from the orchestra's ability to make the music feel physically dangerous.

I noticed the harp as never before thanks to Lydia Buttigieg. Abigail Grech was double bass, Joseph Vella led the saxophone into some very modernist predictions, Lampros-Ioannis Lapinas the contrabassoon, and Sofia Narmania the celesta.

An extraordinary conductor

At the centre of it all stood conductor Barry Kolman, who shaped the performance with impressive control. He allowed the score room to breathe in its more lyrical passages, but never let the tension dissipate. His pacing gave the opera a sense of inevitability: not rushed, but always moving towards its appalling conclusion.

There was an additional fascination to Kolman's presence on the podium. He had also acted in Teatru Manoel's concurrent production of Wilde's *Salomé* earlier that week, an extraordinary double commitment that gave his conducting an added authority. He was not merely interpreting Strauss's score; he had lived inside Wilde's world.

This was a concert performance, then – but a deeply theatrical one. It may not have replaced the full operatic experience, but it revealed the score's inner life with rare intensity.