I saw Heartbeat Opera's production of *Salome* on February 14, 2025. Yes, it's what I call counter-programming for Valentine's Day: rather than a romantic opera like *La Boheme* or *La Traviata* where the leading lady falls in love and dies of a venereal disease, they gave us an opera in which the leading lady is an oversexed teenager saying, "Bring me that bastard's head on a silver platter! And be quick about it!"
Heartbeat is a scrappy chamber opera company in the city that has made its reputation doing re-imagined versions of standard rep pieces. Their most famous production was Beethoven's *Fidelio* in which the prisoners' chorus was sung by actual prisoners - - they filmed inmate choruses at prisons around the state singing the piece. Pretty amazing.
I was frothing the mouth when I heard they were tackling *Salome,* always one of my favorite operas, a piece I know very well indeed. They scaled it back from 17 singers to 7 and the orchestra, rather than close to 100, was only 10. The reduction was the most daring element of their production, and, it turns out, the biggest problem. It seems to me that when you do a reduction you want to choose instruments that would give you the biggest range of color. If I were to do a reduction for 10 instruments, I would do piano, string quartet, woodwind quintet (flute, clarinet, oboe, French horn, bassoon), and percussion. Instead arranger Dan Schlosberg chose 8 clarinet players and two percussionists. Yes, you read that correctly: eight clarinet players. They each played multiple instruments - - the various types of clarinets, naturally, plus four of them also played various saxophones, one played the recorder, and hm, one of them also played electric guitar...? I didn't notice that (probably a good thing).
The opera is an hour and a half long and while is was impressive how much range of color he got out of such a limited palette it also got pretty damn tiresome after a while. That's a whole lot of clarinet. That sound was most compatible with the music for Herod (whose music is skittish and shrill) and John the Baptist (whose music is often hymnlike). It was a problem with Salome herself - - her music is often for shimmering strings and there's no viable wayto communicate that with a mixture of clarinets, saxophones, percussion, and an electric guitar. Let's say this instrumentation choice was a daring experiment that didn't really work.
My favorite moment of the instrumentation was during the Dance of the Seven Veils. In the original version the strings play a grand, mournful, slow waltz theme in C sharp minor. Strauss wrote it for all of the strings starting in unison in a juicy register - - the first notes are the G sharp below middle C to the C sharp above, for those of you who follow that kind of thing. Ashworth had the theme played by a tenor saxophone, making it sound like something played in a smoky nightclub. Entirely appropriate. Took my breath away, the high point of the evening.
Artistic director Jacob Ashworth also did something pretty outrageous - - he wrote new music, brand new music! *Salome* is based on a play by Oscar Wilde - - early in the play Salome manipulates a young soldier into doing something he shouldn't. He's obsessed with her so of course he does it and when she ignores him he kills himself (this all happens in the first 15 minutes of the show so I didn't feel I needed to issue a spoiler alert). The soldier is mourned by his closest friend, a female page in the court. Wilde wrote a short monologue for her, mourning her friend. Strauss chose not to include that in the opera - - we assume he felt it held up the action. Well, Ashworth write a little mournful aria for the mezzo playing the page, laid over the last minute or so of the orchestral interlude after John the Baptist's exit. I could hardly believe the audacity but hey, the opera was written in 1905, I say do what you want. And clearly if you feel you can rescore it for this whackadoodle ensemble, clearly you also feel you have the right to compose brand new music. Where's the harm. We're all going to see the Met's new production in a couple months and can watch any number of productions on YouTube or listen to countless others on recordings.
The two strongest singers were tenor Patrick Cook as Herod and baritone Nathaniel Sullivan as John the Baptist. Cook gave the impression that he could step into the role anywhere in the world, he has a bright voice with plenty of slice and had no problem with the trumpetty tessitura of the role. I doubt that Sullivan would live through a standard issue performance of this piece, his voice doesn't seem to have the heft that Strauss required. But in this context he was just right. And it was a nice change to see a John the Baptist who was young, slim, and (would you believe) blond.
The Salome was Summer Hassan and she was a mixed bag, She was 100% dedicated to the production and was tireless in this marathon role. I got the feeling that ironically she might have sounded better with a full orchestra. True, an orchestra of 100 gives more sound than an ensemble of 10 but that original Strauss orchestra also gives more of a cushion for the singers, for Salome in particular. Yes, there are moments in which she needs to tear the paint of the wall (all those G sharps and A sharps above the staff) but the bulk of the role is really rather lyrical. The problem with Salome's music in this clarinet-heavy context is that I got the feeling that rather than her singing over the orchestra, it felt that she was singing AGAINST the orchestra. Like they were adversaries rather than accomplices. Not a good thing.
The performance was staged at a former church in Brooklyn and it was extra chilling to see this show in such an intimate setting. We saw her making out with the head of J the B yards away, rather than miles away, like at the Met.
Heartbeat's next show is a redo of Gounod's *Faust.* Maybe it'll be scored for five people playing the harmonica, one of them doubling on coffee can...?
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