Elektra discount offer - updated

Not the most generous of discounts, but an offer is an offer.

Stalls tickets for the first three performances of the Royal Opera House's Elektra are up to a third off.

Pick a date from this list, press BUY, then type the discount code STRAUSSELEKTRA into the box in the top right hand corner. Pick your stalls seats from the plan, then select the Last Minute offer price. (If you try to go into the ticket selection page any other way, the code may not work.)

UPDATE - reader Richard has just pointed out an even better offer from LoveTheatre:  stalls seats for £58, or up to 60% off. You don't get to choose your seats with this one, but they do tell you which seats have been allocated before you pay.

Comments

[James]

I can't make this work at the moment - at what point does the choice to select the Last Minute offer price appear? All I see is "Full Price" greyed out. Thanks!
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Intermezzo replies - You need to select a seat; then you will see two price boxes on the left of the page, the lower of which is the £80 price. Remember it's valid for the first three dates only, and it may not work on mobile devices. I would also NOT log in until you've picked your seats, as this sometimes causes offers to disappear.

[Richard]

I jumped too fast and booked for this - there's now a better offer from Lovetheatre - http://www.lovetheatre.com/category/roh

Stalls seats for £58

[Susan]

I don't know whether Christine Goerke is known in your parts, but she had a huge success as Elektra in Chicago last year. She's something of a late bloomer--she was a Met young artist when Sandra Radvanovsky was there. After some vocally rough years she apparently is hitting her stride. I hate to miss this but look forward to her Farberin in November.

[SJT]

On last night's full-out showing, I'd say that Goerke is more notable for scrupulous musicality than having the actual scale of the role naturally within her means. The voice as heard at the general simply tightens and thins the higher it goes, a situation all the more noticeable up against Pieczonka's ideally soaring and voluminous Chrysothemis. But in turned out to be Mother's show, Schuster singing a truly memorably disgusting Clytemnestra (much altered stage-wise from previous outings).

You won't hear the orchestra play any better in a month of Sundays: though Nelsons has a VERY strange idea indeed of how the last eight bars of the score are meant to go, not a hammered blaze so much as a funereal trudge.

[DESR]

I agree largely with SJT: a slow reading, emphasing the lyrical and romantic element at the expense of its more dissonant ingredients. The last bars were indeed very emphatic and powerful, even deliberate. I found it interesting, but went back immediately to my recording of Kleiber conducting this in 1977 at the ROH - all done in 1 hour 25 minutes as compared with 1 hour 50 last night!

[SJT]

Now, I'm not one to nit-pick [pause whilst eldritch cackling at the back subsides] but I think your timings are a bit off. I've always taken stop-watch readings for decades: and last night - with the standard and no less regrettable theatre cuts - clocked in at 103-and-a-half minutes (1'43+''). This is IDENTICAL to any of Solti's performances in the house, either the 1970s ones with Nilsson (my first Elektras) or the 1990 ones with Marton. And though both my diaries and most of my CDs, including the ROH pirates, are still in semi-storage, I know that the similarly trimmed Kleiber/Nilsson performances were only marginally faster, say around 100'. 85' wouldn't be possible technically unless whole fat chunks of the score were missing, a la Mitropoulos in New York, which here they weren't.

[villagediva]

Have booked for the last performance of this. My CD of Nilsson, Resnik, Solti 1968 is 1 hour and 47 minutes long. The performance I saw at ROH with Gwyneth Jones in 1988 (conductor Gerd Albrecht) was, guess what, 1 hour and 43 minutes! This I know from looking up the ‘ROH collections’ database, which is geek-addictive. Did I see the one and only performance in 1988, or does it just mean that ROH haven’t got round to putting details of the other performances on-line yet? I guess it’s an on-going project.

[SJT]

"My CD of Nilsson, Resnik, Solti 1968 is 1 hour and 47 minutes long."

But you have to factor in the fact that the Decca recording is of the full, uncut score, its unique selling-point at the time. Only the subsequent Sawallisch/Marton version on EMI and the LSO Live's recent Gergiev-led account are similarly note-oomplete: the many dozens of others are all snipped, some a lot more than others).

The cut material occurs mainly in three places: the middle section of Elektra's triumph over the cowering Clytemnestra describing how she'll be chased to her death through the house; in the "seduction" scene with Chrysothemis when Elektra describes in creepy detail just what sisterly services she'll perform for her; and in the latter stages of the scene with Orestes, describing what's happened to her. About 6 or 7 minutes' worth, roughly.

[villagediva]

Thanks SJT! It seems that you are the ROH database....... I didn't realise I had the uncut version. Your notes are now tucked into the booklet accompanying the Decca/Jones/Solti recording (2 CD's in fact). The booklet contains the whole libretto - soooo much nicer than having to print pages of the wretched thing off the computer.

[villagediva]

Correction...... did I write Decca/ Jones/Solti? I meant Decca/ Nilsson/Solti of course.
Amazing how you can realise your mistakes while putting cutlery away........

[Richard]

Another offer! Same price as the lovetheatre offer but you can choose your own seats.

From whatsonstage:

Tickets are now only £58 in the Orchestra Stalls for performances on 26 September at 8pm,
6 October at 7.30pm and 12 October at 7pm (usual price for performances Monday to Saturday are £125, £117 and £112 and Sunday performances £100, £97 and £94)

Use code woselektra

[SJT]

I effectively learned the piece from listening to the Solti recording, eventually buying the full score to read whilst listening to it. Imagine then my absolute stunned shock when I finally encountered it live to find various bits of it missing! And under the same conductor, too. I know why they do it: and hand on heart, it's not ruinous; but I still wish they wouldn't. Right now what I'd like to hear most is the uncut score, sung by Lise Lindstrom who genuinely has an Elektra voice, the fine irony being she's in the house, but not singing the role.

Sigh.....