Senior Discount

“Salome”--in which a 16-year-old strips for her lecherous stepfather, makes passionate love to the bloodied, severed head of a saint, and then is squished like an insect by the shields of her stepfather’s henchmen--is the most perverse opera in the canon. It caused a scandal when Richard Strauss wrote it in 1905, and it would cause one today (consider that no American distributors are willing to import a new European feature film of “Lolita”) if it were ever appropriately cast.

Luckily for opera companies, Richard Strauss made sure that that would be impossible. No underage soprano is likely to ever muster the vocal strength or technique to sing it. But L.A. Opera made absolutely sure we would have nothing to worry about in the remounting of its celebrated 11-year-old production of “Salome” Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Hildegard Behrens could be Salome’s grandmother.

The first thing to be said about Behrens’ Salome is that it is not the travesty that had been feared. Behrens is a singing actress who can energize a production, as her Brunnhilde did for the Metropolitan Opera’s staid staging of the Wagner “Ring” cycle a decade ago. Her Los Angeles debut has been long overdue.

Behrens, at 61, has shown signs of severe vocal wear in recent years. She is a hard-pushing soprano, and voices don’t last forever. But she sounds better here than she has lately at the Met. She requires some indulgence. Warmup takes awhile. Not all high notes ring equally. There are pitch and tonal insecurities along the way. But the voice remains powerful and electric, and Salome is a role about losing control of sexual urges, not about prim and proper singing.

The second thing to be said about Behrens is that her Salome is a missed opportunity. No matter how theatrically game she may be, no matter what the libretto calls for, there is no getting around the fact that she is the strong older woman for both Jokanaan (John the Baptist) and Herod (Salome’s stepfather), though in different ways.

Tom Fox (Jokanaan) wears only a loincloth to best display his powerful, gym-sculpted body, but Strauss gives him hollow music, and his baritone is lighter than his build. Timothy Mussard (Herod) is a pudgy young heldentenor with a strapping voice.

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The implications--Mrs. Robinson, Chippendales--are unavoidable. This is, after all, a kinky opera. But instead of a “Salome” that makes use of such associations, Behrens has been placed in Peter Hall’s 1986 production, which was made for the kittenish Maria Ewing, who sang the opera as a 100-minute sexual mad scene. That production, and Ewing’s nudity, helped establish L.A. Opera in its first season as a daring company.

Behrens attempts, in her own sensual manner, to fit in, with the help of the current director, Christopher Harlan. She does not, of course, go all the way in the “Dance of the Seven Veils.” But she does throw herself around more than appears easy for her, and she even attempts Ewing’s trick of rolling down the stairs in ecstasy, though it necessarily becomes now more cautiously aerobic than autoerotic.

Herodias, Herod’s wife and Salome’s mother, is another older woman in this production. The role is sung by Helga Dernesch, who was once an important Wagnerian soprano. Though two years younger than Behrens, she has made the shift to mezzo-soprano and more mature parts. She is magnificent.

Herodias is a shrew, and the production attempts to treat her as bizarre caricature. But Dernesch won’t allow it; she is proud, strong, moral and dangerous. And although the production refuses to acknowledge it (typecasting is still the exception in opera), the subtext becomes Herod as young mama’s boy, pudgy and decadent, replacing his stern mother figure Herodias with his more voluptuous mother figure Salome, and he has to have his stepdaughter killed.

While doing its unsuccessful best to evade all such issues, the performance at least has a nice sheen to it. John Bury’s silvery set, appearing like a Hundertwasser watercolor, is not very sophisticated and is starting to look a little dated, but it serves. The soldiers and Jews and Nazarenes make up a skillful ensemble. Kurt Streit is an appropriately star-struck Narraboth, and Pamela Helen Stephen an attractive Page.

Richard Hickox conducts in very long, insinuating phrases, as if the opera were one long dance of sex and death. Which is exactly what it is.

* L.A. Opera’s “Salome” continues Sunday, Wednesday, Jan. 24 and 27 at 7:30 p.m. and Jan. 31, 1 p.m. (with Helen Field as Salome), Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., $24-$135. (213) 365-3500.