Saturday was an evening of goodbyes at Orchestra Hall as conductor Andrew Litton brought the curtain down on 15 years as artistic director of Sommerfest, the Minnesota Orchestra's special season of summer concerts.
It can safely be said that Litton went out with a bang and not a whimper. He made performing operas in concert a hallmark of his Sommerfest tenure, and his choice of "Salome" for a grand finale fulfilled a long-standing desire to bring Richard Strauss' festering psychodrama to the Twin Cities.
Front and center at Saturday's performance was soprano Patricia Racette as Strauss' sexually messed-up antiheroine.
Racette's was a dominant, indefatigable performance that rose to considerable heights of intensity. She occasionally pushed sharp of the note — forgivable when you have a super-large orchestra venting on stage behind you.
Tenor Dennis Petersen got loud cheers for his leering, comedically styled Herod, pecked to petulance by mezzo Katharine Goeldner as his sequined wife, Herodias.
Pick of the evening vocally was baritone Stephen Powell's resonantly phrased John the Baptist, a lonely voice of probity in the undrained moral swamp around him.
Gregory Keller's semi-staging of the opera allowed some interaction between the characters, and a nod toward basic props and accoutrements — champagne flutes and bottles of bubbly were brandished, and religious tracts were passed around the audience.
As happens so often in semi-stagings, however, what was missing in the action was more striking than what was present.
