5/5 Salome
  by Donald M. Clement (Slidell, Louisiana)
A very remarkable performance........I have just finished enjoying it for the third time in just two weeks......will treasure it.

5/5 Salome as Expressionist nightmare
  by Santa Fe listener
Others have praised this Covent Garden Salome for its dramatic impact, and with good cause. The direcotr, Luc Bondy, has translated the opera into tortured terms that the painter Egon Schiele would recognize; the sexuality is masochistic, frenzied, and self-destructive. John the Baptist is no solemn stick of wood -- Bryn Terfel makes him as agonized and writhing as Salome herself. But the brunt of the Expressionist labor falls on the cat-like Malfitano, whose descent into madness is neither campy nor stagey. She's a great actress, and she adapts to the stylized movements straight out of Nosferatu with total conviction. (Only the opening scene is weak, since her girlish figure can't completely disguise that she is considerably too old to be the Judean princess.)

On the musical side, I'm willing to forgive a lot. Terfel is magnificent and dominates the stage with sheer vocal prowess. He may look like a truck driver wrapped in a bath sheet, but all doubts disappear when he turns on the vocal charisma. Malfitano works from the opposite direction. Her voice, let's face it, is completely inadequate to the role except in terms of daring and stamina. She attacks every note fearlessly, even though her voice lacks the gleam, heft, and seductiveness that the role requires (as a result, the accompanying CD set from Decca, made with the Vienna Phil., cruelly exposed her vocal shortcomings). Without her petite frame and superb acting abilities, Malfitano wouldn't stand a chance. As the odious Herod and Herodias, Kenneth Riegel and Anja Silja (aka Mrs. Dohnanyi) are reliable, hammy stage veterans.

As for the conducting, Dohnanyi makes the Covent Garden orchestra play like gods -- he has always been strong in the opera pit -- but he draws back during the orgasmic outcries of Salome, in both the first and last scene. I imagine part of his reticence was an attempt to make things easier for Malfitano, but we the listeners are the losers.

With all these musical reservations, I sitll give five stars because of Terfel and the utterly convincing stage direction. This was one of the most gripping opera DVDs I've seen.

1/5 poor!
  by someone
Please just watch the dance scene and tell me what is this? Here is the worst possible choreography and dance and design. Salome-Malfitano is rather a poor dancer girl or a Carmen than a princess! And she can't dance. She is almost comic with her awkward figures. It is a very very bad performance. If Salome would have danced like that, I think Herod would have died with dissapointment.

4/5 a worthwhile Salome
  by J. Anderson (Monterey, CA USA)
5star highlights of this Covent Garden production are the closing twenty minutes of American Catherine Malfitano's singing of the title role -merciless intensity and voracious singing! - and the magnificent performance of Bryn Terfel as Jokanaan. We enjoyed seeing Malfitano's Cio-Cio San in Butterfly in San Francisco in the late nineties, and her singing here is even more engaged, more opened - a real success. There are aspects to her singing that can be bothersome at times; a lack of extravagant vocal reserves creates a sometimes monotonous approach to color, a feeling that she is always using everything she has, although she finds vocal color and drama aplenty in the closing scene. In general, however, It's hard to fault her Salome in this production - she's up to the task vocally and is a superb singing actor, one of the best around. Made for the camera (and the camera work here is unfailingly fine), Malfitano delivers a non-stop performance that exposes every nerve of Strauss' insane Princess. Terfel is as compelling a Jokanaan as I've ever heard - wild and devout and determined, plenty of physical braun and as musically committed a John the Baptist as might be possible. His singing is perfect, and his presence compelling. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Dohnanyi's disengaged conducting and the formulaic blandness of the Covent Garden orchestra leaves a lot to be desired. Some of it seems to be the recorded sound which never rises to compete with the stage action, but I sense a lack of direction on Dohnanyi's part, surprising since I'm an admirer of his orchestral conducting in general. The evocative tension of Strauss' orchestral writing of the last half hour never materializes. Can't explain this misstep, but it noticably diminishes the vibrancy of the production. In contrast to some reviews on this page, Riegel's Herod is ardently sung - the arrogance of Herod's cravenness is striking and convincing, indicating not only acting chops but a bountiful, solid singing technique. If only the orchestra didnt sound as if it were on vacation! All in all, one of the best filmed Salomes available, superior by leagues to the redoubtable Maria Ewing's shouted version at the same house, and in my view, better than the Malfitano/Estes Berlin version, especially in the art design department. Here, the focus is completely on the singing drama, and is the better for it. After Deborah Voigt's very recent Chicago triumph in her first staged Salome, we can hope she will commit a performance to video disc. Don't hesitate with this one, however. It delivers the goods.

5/5 spellbinding!
  by Romualdo A. Monteclar (new york)
The performances are truly magnificent, most especially that of
Miss Malfitano. Well, I had no idea that John the Baptist could be
intensely fascinating and (pardon the word) SEXY as played by Terfel.
Highly recommended!