But even compressing the grandeur of “Tosca” to a few cellos, bass, piano, flute, trumpet and horn isn’t as out-there as imagining “Salome” for an octet of clarinetists. (To be precise, those eight musicians play a total of 28 instruments, including a handful of saxophones, and they’re buttressed by two busy percussionists.)
The concept is radical because Strauss’s breakthrough opera is defined like few others by the expressionistic power of its huge orchestra. The score’s brilliance, though, lies in a paradox: For much of the piece, the sprawling forces are meant to sound seductively diaphanous, a Mack truck navigating curves with eerily catlike grace.
If it’s sheer numbers you’re looking for, the Metropolitan Opera is presenting a new, full-scale production of “Salome” this spring. We go to Heartbeat, though, to be mere feet from the performers, with stagings that lucidly connect chestnuts to contemporary issues: Black Lives Matter, unjust incarceration, gun violence, racial stereotyping.
Moreover, in Dan Schlosberg we trust. He is the musical mastermind behind Heartbeat’s daring arrangements, and his work is always intriguing — even if this clarinet-orgy “Salome” is an orchestration I admired more than adored. While this was a Strauss drained of much of his kaleidoscope of jeweled colors, Schlosberg’s instrumentation, conducted by Jacob Ashworth, did bring out a dusky liquidity in the piece, stabbed by wails and squeaks. Playing en masse, the ensemble could achieve organlike saturation.
Presented in the intimate surroundings of the Space at Irondale, with the performers exposed between two blocks of seating, the queasy-making story unfolded with raw clarity, though in a stiff English translation. John the Baptist (the opera’s Jochanaan) is being held captive in the palace of Herod in ancient Judea, and Herod’s teenage stepdaughter, Salome, becomes obsessed with him. Herod, who’s in love with her, promises her anything she wants in exchange for a dance; she obliges, then demands John’s head, which she kisses in an ecstatic final monologue.
