The shortest opera at the Met this year was also the most potent: Strauss’s “Salome.” Some 90 minutes after the first downbeat I stumbled out shaken but invigorated. Claus Guth’s staging, haunted by six young doubles of its heroine, reframed Strauss’s biblical shocker as a study in post-traumatic stress. Elza van den Heever’s cool, luminous Salome led a superb cast. In the pit, Yannick Nézet-Séguin whipped up a performance of simmering force — a welcome reminder that opera is capable of delivering bone-rattling catharsis.
// Feature