From around the world: Paris.(International)(Opera Review)

The first new production of Hugues Gall's final season at the Opera National de Paris was Lev Dodin's staging of Strauss's Salome, conducted by music director James Conlon, with Karita Mattila in her role debut as the heroine.

Dodin's recent opera stagings have been uninspiring: a controversial The Queen of Spades at the Opera, in 1999, and a dull take on Rubinstein's The Demon last season at the Chatelet. However, Salome found the director at his best, offering a classic reading, free of any fanciful interpretive ideas, seconded by neo-biblical costumes by David Borovsky, whose brown, Gothic set was dominated by a cage in which Jochanaan was imprisoned. This replaced the cistern described in the libretto, and it allowed for more physical tension than is usually seen between Salome and the prophet.

From her entrance, Mattila presented the character as a profoundly disturbed young woman, a combination of petulant, spoiled child and mature, voraciously sexual woman. Her tiny footsteps and fidgety thigh movements all suggested dysfunctional behavior, culminating as she thrust her pelvis longingly against the bars of Jochanaan's cage. His lack of response was not merely a rejection of her devious morality but a condemnation of a rampant, out-of-control sexual being. In the dance of the seven veils, the Finnish soprano brilliantly turned a non-dancer's clumsiness and ungainliness into manifestations of Salome's psychological problems. Sudden, jerky movements and some lunging, childlike ballerina movements were augmented by Jean Kalman's outstanding lighting. (For the record, the soprano was naked, her back to the audience, at the end of the dance; she was covered up quickly by Herodias.)