NEW YORK—Richard Strauss’s opera “Elektra” was the last work staged by Patrice Chéreau. The director died shortly after the opening at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2013. Now at the Metropolitan Opera, staged by Chéreau’s assistant director Vincent Huguet and featuring a top-flight cast with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, “Elektra” truly electrifies.
The action takes place in one concentrated act. The libretto, by Strauss’s most important collaborator, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, was based on Sophocles’s tragedy.
