L.A. Opera’s Final ‘Salome’ Finds Some Sizzle in Field’s Performance

The opera community has been strongly divided over the L.A. Opera’s presentation of “Salome,” which featured the local debut of Hildegard Behrens singing the title role in a late stage of her career. But the audience Saturday got no notion of that at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, since Helen Field assumed the role for the last performance of Strauss’ once (and on this afternoon, still) scandalous opera.

Field is a young Welsh singer who has thus far made a name for herself in Britain singing 20th century opera, some Strauss and Puccini but also new work. She is not, at first appearance, the Salome type. She is small and girlish, more proper than lurid, more playful and curious than pouty and lascivious. More Alice than Lolita.

And yet she is a captivating Salome. The voice, while not heavy or ecstatic, is a strong, focused, clear and seemingly tireless soprano. And she portrayed Salome less as a self-involved, hateful teenager whose hormones have gone completely off the map than as a spoiled young girl in a dysfunctional royal family.

Field, in fact, plays Salome as a headstrong young girl first coming to terms with her sexuality. And given the circumstances of a much too sexy prophet, John the Baptist, a lustful stepfather-uncle, a vengeful mother, everything goes awry to disastrous results. Sex in “Salome” is power, and power is used to crush the weak. For Field’s Salome, orgasm, so vividly exposed in Strauss’ music, equals death.

Cast and conductor (Richard Hickox) were otherwise the same, but the gripping effect of Field changed all for the better.