Mark Elder: The tamer

Mark Elder’s conducting seduced me from the very first bar of the overture. It does not matter what he conducts, he always finds the perfect balance between quiet intimacy and loud explosions. When accompanying the singers, he also balances merely underlining their vocal lines and assigning the orchestra the prominent part it deserves. These balances are particularly difficult to achieve with Stiffelio, an opera in which it is all too easy to overdo the somewhat frantic rhythm and the occasionally overblown use of the brass and percussion. He achieved all these and hence his Stiffelio was at once delicate and robust. Elder, however, had to face yet another challenge: the opera stars singing this performance of Stiffelio do not rank amongst the subtlest.

In his first appearance on stage, José Cura did not pay much attention to Elder’s…