The Bard Fisher Center apparently presents one large-scale opera production per year (even though it's at Bard College, these are not student productions; they're fully professional). They seem to generally focus on lesser-known operas, and they've recently stuck a bunch of their past productions on youtube, which is great. I shall watch many of them.
Starting, obviously, with this one. The plot is what the title would lead you to expect, pretty much, in three somewhat discrete parts. In the first act, Clytemnestra plots with her lover Aegisthus to murder the returning Agamemnon (and as a special bonus, they also murder Cassandra). In the second, Orestes returns home and has a reunion with Elektra. He kills Aegisthus, feels some compunction about killing his mom, but does it anyway and is immediately consumed with guilt. In the third act he's being tormented by a chorus of Eumenides (Elektra just having kind of disappeared); he takes shelter in Apollo's temple; Apollo decrees that he will be put on trial. There are an even number of votes to convict and acquit (shouldn't they have chosen an odd number of jurors?), but Pallas Athena appears and breaks the tie in his favor, declaring that from now on humanity will be ruled by love, compassion, and mercy. If only.
(I always though Aegisthus was just some random guy, but it turns out he was the son of a rival of Atreus and there's a whole tangled, bloody backstory. I guess I should've figured; people talk about superhero comics have excessively convoluted continuities, but they have nothing on Greek mythology.)
I'll level with you: this opera rules pretty hard. It has great dramatic romantic music, and it really captures the sort of bleak majesty of these stories and shows you why proved so persistent. In fairness, the last act breaks the momentum a bit--I suppose that when you cap off a tragic story with a more or less happy ending, that's inevitable--but overall I basically loved it.
The production is great, too. It appears to have the trappings of late Tsarist Russia, which is appropriate, but I really liked the way everyone acted the hell out of it. I was especially impressed by Liuba Sokolova as Clytemnestra and Olgta Tolkmit as Elektra. The latter in particular: at first it seems like she's more or less with it and in control until gradually you realize that she's not all there. There's a scene where, while Orestes is in the main room dealing with Clytemnestra, she's sitting at the kitchen table with Aegisthus' corpse eating and having an animated conversation with a portrait of her dead father that was just *chef's kiss*
This was Taneyev's only opera, which is a shame, as I would be happy to see more.
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