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?Elektra? is perhaps the most thoroughly professional and leas indulgent of all the Richard Strauss operas, despite its relatively early place in the canon. James Levine, blessed with one of the world's great orchestras in his pit, puts a deeper feeling in the piece by playing it for sheer sensuous orchestral beauty. Never have I felt so thoroughly seduced by the sound of a Strauss orchestra as I was on March 31.

The art of staging "Elektra" is the discovery of a way to shrink a large stage to accommodate virtually non-existent (visible) action. Hofmannsthal asked for a setting 'mysterious and sinister,? free of 'fake appurtenances of antiquity, such as columns, broad staircases, etc., which tend to disillusion rather than to stir the imagination'. Otto Schenk and Jurgen Rose have dealt with the problem by placing the wall of the palace fairly forward on the stage and blocking the right half with a huge fallen bronze horse, conveniently broken in the middle to permit some exits stage right. The left side, meanwhile, is a sideways-sloping ramp. The courtyard is roofed, the roof broken with a slash the width of the stage; the front part of the roof extends in from the proscenium. The stairs up to the palace look a little like the ruins you can see today at Mycenae. The palace itself is a flat wall cut with rather art nouveau patterned open*ings, through which dancers carrying torches appear and disappear, some of them running down ramps as banquet suppliers with animals trussed to poles, others escorting the Queen with her court. Clearly an unsanitary place. The set might have been effective if the lighting had not been impossibly meaningless and amateurish, alternately brighter and darker without concern for the progress of the evening. We didn't even get the bath of blood-red torchlight at the end, specifically requested in the score.

Paid for by Cynthia Wood, the opera was produced for Hildegard Behrens, who made it through the first performance on March 26 in what people who were there have described as one of the great triumphs of mind and guts over matter. She cancelled on March 31, offering an opportunity to Penelope Daner, a 40-year-old native New Yorker who has been singing mostly in Wuppertal, Regensburg, Saarbrucken and Bremen, and who will now I hope get chances in larger houses. Executing the choreography planned for Behrens, Daner was vocally effective (perhaps a touch thin for a 4,000-seat house) and obviously well-trained, with no fear at all of open*ing her mouth very wide and letting go. She was not thrown into the role, having been given a stage rehearsal and having sung it while Behrens mimed for the dress, but even so she was impressively collected and absorbed for someone who had barely appeared in this house (as a Valkyrie), four years ago.

Leonie Rysanek, once again shepherding her limited resources to maximum effect, was a convincingly awful but not hysterical Klytemnestra. Deborah Voigt was dazzling as Chrysothemis, one of the most grateful roles in Strauss, but rarely sung with such power and ease. I thought well of Bernd Weikl's Orestes, too; and James King was in suitable voice as Aegisthus. But the overwhelming effect of the evening was Levine's orchestra and the lyrical sweep of Levine's conception.

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