Review: Heartbeat Opera Compresses Strauss’s ‘Salome’

Strauss’s “Salome” begins with a swiftly slithering clarinet flourish, like a snake darting into the undergrowth almost before you see it. The passage is over in a couple of seconds, but it sets the stage for what’s to come: sinuous, nocturnal, elusive.

This germ of music ends up infecting one of the sickliest scores in opera: a 1905 one-act setting of Oscar Wilde’s languorously decadent, gleefully fetid fin-de-siècle play about a society slow-dancing toward self-destruction.

It’s obvious, then, where Heartbeat Opera got the batty, witty idea of doing the work almost only with clarinets. The vividly unvarnished results, which opened on Thursday at the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, may be the most implausible yet of this feisty company’s chamber-scale takes on the classics.

Heartbeat’s productions don’t reduce canonical compositions so much as reinvent them, with orchestras that could fit around a dining table. Over the past decade, it has given us a six-instrument “Madama Butterfly” and a jazz-infused “Carmen,” both trimmed to an hour and a half. Beethoven’s “Fidelio” was pared to two pianos, two cellos, two horns and percussion.

But even compressing the grandeur of “Tosca” to a few cellos, bass, piano, flute, trumpet and horn isn’t as out-there as imagining “Salome” for an octet of clarinetists. (To be precise, those eight musicians play a total of 28 instruments, including a handful of saxophones, and they’re buttressed by two busy percussionists.)

The concept is radical because Strauss’s breakthrough opera is defined like few others by the expressionistic power of its huge orchestra. The score’s brilliance, though, lies in a paradox: For much of the piece, the sprawling forces are meant to sound seductively diaphanous, a Mack truck navigating curves with eerily catlike grace.