EIF: Strauss’s Elektra

Usher Hall, Edinburgh - 23/08/26

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Karina Canellakis (conductor), Ingela Brimberg (Elektra), Vida Miknevičiūtė (Chrysothemis), Karen Cargill (Klytämnestra), Günther Groissböck (Orest), John Daszak (Aegisth). 

Richard Strauss’s Elektra is an opera of relentless psychological intensity and powerful orchestral architecture, and this Edinburgh International Festival performance offered a striking example of how to capture the melodrama, tragedy and sheer human bile – embodied in twisted minds and unearthed axes – in concert form. 

Bringing together a world-class cast and the forces of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under the incisive baton of Karina Canellakis, the production was a visceral exploration of vengeance, trauma, and familial decay with dark Freudian undertones. Yet, as with any large scale operatic canvas, the evening’s acoustic nuances varied depending with one’s position in the hall.

For those seated directly in front of the stage, the emotional impact was at its most vivid. However, this immediacy came with a trade-off. The sheer volume and raw friction of fierce recitatives sometimes made it a little difficult to parse the intricate orchestral counterpoint behind them, masking delicate, chamber-like whispers woven into the woodwinds and lower strings.

Despite these inevitable acoustic challenges, Canellakis commanded the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s large instrumental apparatus with a strong sense of structural command, balancing the work's terrifying climaxes with moments of haunting, fragile lyricism. The cast delivered performances of genuine dramatic commitment. Ingela Brimberg, stepping in for soprano Iréne Theorin as Elektra, and Karen Cargill replacing Nina Stemme as Klytämnestra, took immediate ownership of their roles.

Brimberg tackled the formidable title role with poise, grit and stamina, capturing Elektra’s obsessive, consuming grief and rage with intensity. As Chrysothemis, Vida Miknevičiūtė provided the counter-weight, her upper register injecting a desperate yearning for normal life and motherhood into an otherwise suffocating atmosphere.

Karen Cargill delivered a striking lesson in psychological portraiture as Klytämnestra, a shattered, paranoid monarch haunted by her own guilt. Her exchanges with Brimberg crackled with a toxic, generational confrontation that anchored the emotional core of the evening. Meanwhile, Günther Groissböck’s Orest brought gravitas and steady authority to the opera’s final, brutal movements.

Indeed, the whole vocal cast deserves credit. Because altogether, this ecstatically received performance focused the listener’s attention where it necessarily belongs: on the struggle between Hofmannsthal’s libretto and Strauss’s revolutionary harmonies.

A virtual blueprint for modernism, Elektra pushed late-Romantic chromaticism to its breaking point. That is my highest personal point of appreciation. But Sturm und Drang impulse leaves little room to breathe. It is a score that essentially exists in a state of permanent climax, where even the moments meant to offer tenderness or relief feel like they are being squeezed through a fist.

Ultimately, this Elektra, the second concert performance of a major operatic work (the other being Don Giovanni) at EIF ’26, was an achievement of scale and nerve. It reminded the audience that Strauss's disturbance comes not merely through a wall of sound, but a meticulously engineered labyrinth of human anger and confusion.

Both a physical assault and a textured sonic panorama, the power of this performance lingered well after the final, crashing chords had faded into the Edinburgh night.