SALOME – Based on Oscar Wilde’s play, Strauss’s landmark opera was greeted with shock, horror, excitement, awe, respect, censorship, scandal, condemnation - just the kind of responses that fill theatres and cinemas to this day. The music, sweet, sour, erotic, often dizzily thrilling, has not been blunted by time. This is no overture. A rising arpeggio on the clarinet launches Narraboth into his rapturous vision of Salome and, from there to the end, there is let-up in the intensity and tension of