Winehouse at the Western Wall... with robots: Salome at Latvian National Opera

“Gentlemen, there are no difficulties or problems. This is a Scherzo with a fatal conclusion.” So said Richard Strauss at an early rehearsal of Salome, to quell any misgivings about his most avant garde score to date and its revelations of sexuality’s darkest side. Sadly, the sensible German was not there to advise at the outset of Alvis Hermanis’ new production for Latvian National Opera, and the result is a welter of difficulties, several insurmountable problems and a conclusion that looks like a joke.

We are five years into the future at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. The state of Israel no longer exists (according to some on-screen set-up instructions) and people of all faiths are welcome here to express themselves amongst the white plastic picnic chairs that have survived the revolution. Jews and Muslims pray side by side, notwithstanding a fair amount of weaponry, and there is also Amy Winehouse cavorting with a beachball. Two traffic cones and some stripy tape mark the trap door that leads to Jochanaan, an AI robot whose unsettling prophesies suggest that he has started to programme himself and is therefore a danger to humanity. Meanwhile Amy Winehouse – apparently Salome – is a danger to Jochanaan.

Aside the action – and there is a bewildering amount of it – are a series of large AI-generated images possibly designed to enhance the roles of the troubled princess and her stepfather’s captive, but instead show nothing but the limitations of the form. Somebody in the production team has typed in ‘robot prophet’ and, lo, there are several versions of an Aryan cyber-Jesus. The instruction ‘erotic princess’ has resulted in an embarrassing gallery that is the adolescent gamer’s idea of the female form. 

Improbable AI breasts do at least draw the eye away from some even worse choices. A group of women in niqab run about the stage all of a sudden at the mention of blackbirds before stripping down to golden bikinis for the Dance of the Seven Veils. It’s an extremely uncomfortable moment but for all the wrong reasons. Mesmerised by his own fantasy, Hermanis has absented Salome altogether from her obligation to the opera’s disconcerting turning point, and instead strands Amy Winehouse at the front of the stage peeling a red cabbage. 

Winehouse had a lot of problems in her tragically short life but AI wasn’t one of them, so quite what she was doing here was as unclear to a beleaguered Astrid Kessler as it was to the rest of us. Despite making what she could of a role she’s previously sung in Antwerp and Palermo, as Kessler wound herself in Jochanaan’s severed wires for several long minutes, she sounded less animated by unbounded eroticism and more that she was losing the will to live. 

Egils Silinš as Jochanaan sounded arresting in those magical moments that Strauss creates for this mysterious, seductive presence but, in a challenge to even the most charismatic baritone’s authority, the poor man must emerge lurchingly from his trapdoor to deliver his pronouncements while walking like a Thunderbird.

Mercifully free of concept, Thomas Blondelle and Zanda Švēde are left to their own devices as Herodesand Herodias and their toxic partnership proves a welcome area of credibility, while Irma Pavāre’s bold and capacious voice gets a tantalisingly brief airing as the Page. Falling foul of his own device is Raimonds Bramanis, vocally uneven as Narraboth and doomed to flail about in a suicide vest that eventually goes off in a slight puff.

In the end, it’s best to close your eyes and enjoy the music. Riga’s opera house is a twinkling chocolate box and hearing Mārtiņš Ozoliņš propel the Latvian National Opera Orchestra through the overwhelming chicanery of Strauss’ score in such an intimate setting is pleasure enough. 

When good operas get bad productions the best any of us can do is to try to understand them on their own terms. Perhaps the take-home here is that AI is only as good as the very limited minds that programme it and woe-betide us all when it starts to regurgitate all our prejudices and shortcomings back in our faces. In which case, props to Salome for pulling the plug.

Eleanor's press trip to Riga was funded by the Riga Investment and Tourism Agency