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(More customer reviews)Anything is possible. But Pluto will start rotating around Venus before there will ever be a better or equal performance of Salome than this performance by Cathy Malfitano with Deutsche Oper Berlin. There may be better voices but she is one of the best dramatic actresses to ever grace an opera stage. She totally mesmerizes the viewer with a range of facial expressions that perfectly conveys Salome's journey from curiosity to infatuation and finally total insanity in her amorous pursuit of John the Baptist.
Cathy was born on April 18, 1948, and the date listed for this performance is 1990 which would put her in her early forties for this performance. But at the end of the Dance of the Seven Veils when she drops the final veil and is totally nude on the screen for around a second, if you are a heterosexual male from nine to ninety, your top priority in life at that particular instant of time will be to find the pause button on your remote control. The full frontal nudity wasn't choreographed for titillation but to enforce Salome's total commitment to possessing the unfortunate prophet. However, her most alluring physical feature isn't her statuesque body but her eyes-huge luminous brown orbs which she uses to penetrate your soul. At the end when she is kissing the head of the holy man on the lips she has a look of total insanity that I haven't seen since Jimmy Cagney found out his ma died in the movie White Heat.
The supporting performers are also superb. Simon Estes is a regal, stoic John the Baptist who rejects each of Salome's advances with a stern Niemals. Horst Hiestermann as Herod delivers his lines with the rapid fire staccato of a machine gun. Leonie Rysanek plays Herodias with the usual trailer park trash touch. But Cathy's performance soars above all others.
In addition to this performance I also have the DVD of the divine Ms. Malfitano's other performance with Covent Garden, sultry Maria Ewing's, and the laser disk of petite Teresa Stratas. All are interesting and entertaining performances of Salome but this Deutsche Oper belongs in a separate category and is easily one of the best performances of any opera of any kind ever recorded.
So I award 5 stars each to Oscar Wilde for his poem which provides the mellifluous phrases, composer Richard Strauss for one of his best scores, conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli for being the glue that holds it all together, and all the secondary singers for support and the supernumeraries for just standing there. And to Cathy I award the Andromeda Nebulae.
Being a Kultur disk all you get is plain vanilla stereo and no extras. But, in this case, that is more than enough. I do wish someone would put Cathy's performance of Tosca on DVD as well.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Strauss - Salome / Malfitano, Rysanek, Hiestermann, Estes, Sinopoli, Berlin Opera
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