Oedipe, classical review: A very complex Oedipus

​Each of the rare outings of Enescu’s masterpiece Oedipe in recent years has elicited the bewildered question: why do we not hear it more often? All praise to Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO for presenting this extraordinary work, albeit in concert performance (coloured lights projected on the organ case but no character interaction).

Jurowski has spoken of the demanding nature of the score – its huge forces, the layering of textures and cryptic subdivisions of beats – and indeed things took some time to settle. The third act has the most compelling dramatic trajectory: Oedipus’ anger soothed by a sensuous Jocasta (Ruandra Donose), followed by his horrified realisation of the truth, and an anguished scene of revelation culminating in his self-blinding. Jurowski maintained a tight grip; all that was missing was the vital theatrical component so thrillingly realised in Alex Ollé’s production at Covent Garden last year.

There was a single gesture towards theatricality in Act 2, when an amplified Hungarian mezzo, Ildikó Komlósi, posed her swooping riddles from a side box, the organ case bathed in blood-red light. Her death-cry was eerily completed by a musical saw.

Edmond Fleg’s libretto gives us the entire life span of the tragic hero and offers a tendentious redemptive conclusion, movingly presented here.

Paul Gay was satisfactory if uninspiring as Oedipus, but there was a fine Tiresias from Willard White and Antigone from Gabriela Istoc. The singers I’d like to have heard more of were in relatively minor roles: In Sung Sim as Phorbas, Boris Pinkhasovich as Theseus and Marius Vlad Budoiu as Laius.