_{Houston Grand Opera Salome} Maestro Keri-Lynn Wilson “balanced crisp rhythms and powerhouse sonority with delicacy and lilt”

There is a lot of talk in Richard Strauss’s Salome that something bad may happen. Several unfortunate things happened concerning Houston Grand Opera’s sixth staging of the opera, seen April 30 in Wortham Theater Center’s Brown Theater. But multiple delays and substitutions didn’t faze the company, which debuted in 1956 with a performance of, what else, Salome.

COVID forced a postponement of the staging not once but twice. Soprano Amanda Majeski was to make her HGO and role debut in the title role but she was replaced by Laura Wilde, anther newcomer to the part and the company. Mezzo soprano Denyce Graves withdrew as Herodias, so famed soprano Karita Mattila, once a celebrated Salome herself, took her place. And HGO Principal Guest Conductor Eun Sun Kim was replaced by Canadian Keri-Lynn Wilson.

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Wilson has led many operas and many different kinds of opera, but here she was conducting her first Salome. Founder of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, she made a potent HGO debut with her aptly high-tensile-strength reading of the score that balanced crisp rhythms and powerhouse sonority with delicacy and lilt in the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Apparently no relation to the Divine Oscar who wrote the play on which the opera is based, Laura Wilde has a lighter vice than some sopranos who have sung Salome. But her bright tone, assured acting and strong top register enabled her to play a deranged teenager effectively and sing demanding music commandingly. Karita Mattila looked glamorous and also sang and acted potently. As Herod, Chad Shelton supplied a keen tenor, pliant phrasing and a fervid characterization. Ryan McKinny delivered Jokanaan’s rants with a voluminous bass-baritone that was strong both high and low, and the many smaller roles were robustly sung.

The production bore an “adult content” warning and was a festival of bold visual strokes that sometimes ran counter to the story. New to the U.S., it was created for Spain’s Palau de los Arts Reina Sofia de Valencia by director Francisco Negrin, set and costume designer Louis Désiré, lighting designer Bruno Poet and projection/video designer Joan Rodón.  Herod’s palace retinue includes party girls in bustiers, garter belts and thigh-high boots. His soldiers wear Nazi-ish uniforms. Herodias sports a long black velvet gown slit to mid-thigh on both sides. Her platinum blonde wig gets snatched off to reveal her bald head. Jokanaan is kept not in a cistern but a huge sphere imbedded in a curved rune-covered wall and outfitted with a screen at the back showing roiling Lava Lamp-style projections (a form of punishment?).

During the Dance of the Seven Veils, in which Salome is moved around by two party girls and a male pal, an upstage bank of TV screens shows some home movies of the princess as a girl playing with a hula hoop and going to the beach. Herod then videotapes his step-daughter before raping her in a side room. When Jokanaan’s intact body is dragged onstage, Herod keeps his head-on-a-silver-platter promise to Salome by slipping a tray under the corpse’s head like a pillow. She never gets her deranged kiss, though. She sings her rapturous final soliloquy from inside Jokanaan’s spherical cell, and her offstage murder is indicated by a bunch of upstage smoke (an auto-da-fe?).

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