Orchestration by Amy Bryce.
Libretto by Athena Stevens based on the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde
An OperaUpClose in partnership with Opera North and artsdepot.
Sung in English, with English side titles
Can violence truly free us from the trauma that imprisons us?
A woman lives alone in a room suspended outside time, surrounded by relics and haunted by a past event she cannot escape. Her only connection to the world is an evangelical preacher, Jochanaan, whose radio broadcasts of sin and judgement draw her into an obsessive desire.
As memory and reality blur, the story of her past emerges. Her stepfather, Herod, exerts power over her through affection and humiliation, demanding her attention while disguising domination as love. For years Salome has lived within the system he created. But now she imagines a way out. When Herod promises to grant her any wish, she agrees to dance.
OperaUpClose comes to the Buxton International Festival for the first time with Richard Strauss and Oscar Wilde’s Salome, reimagined in a new acoustic-electronic chamber orchestration by Amy Bryce from a musical idea by Phoenix Rousiamanis, featuring an original English libretto by Olivier Award-nominated writer Athena Stevens. This reinvention of a classic opera is directed by Anna Morrissey. Reducing Strauss’s iconic 80-piece orchestra to a piano-percussion duo with electronics is both a thrilling musical challenge and a striking act of artistic distillation.
Directed by Flora McIntosh
Opera image coming soon
