Prima la musica… For over half a century, the opera world has obsessed over the ways that directors try to revolutionize the classics. Elizabeth Dinkova says she wants to restore Salome‘sshock value by forcing us to see the characters as reflections of ourselves. To that end, Heartbeat Opera is performing the work not in German but in plainspoken English. But the real Robespierre in the mix is the composer Dan Schlosberg. He’s the guy who rescored Beethoven’s Fidelio for two pianos, two horns, two cellos, and percussion, to ear-tingling effect. Now Schlosberg has reduced Richard Strauss’s splashy, notoriously gargantuan orchestra to a combo of eight clarinets (occasionally swapped out for saxophones) plus two percussionists. It just so happens that the very first thing you hear in Salome is an unaccompanied wisp of melody played by the first clarinet. “Yes,” Schlosberg told us when we asked, “that opening clarinet solo likely provided my initial impulse to spotlight the clarinet. Mainly, though, I was interested in imbuing the orchestration with a sense of explosive claustrophobia.” Besides, he said, it’s a turn-on for him to contemplate the “extreme virtuosity” it will take for eight players in the same instrument family to activate a score conceived for over 100 instruments. “It’s kind of diabolical.” As for the percussion, it not only provides “a broader color palette” but also “a particular violence”—de rigueur in this tale of a dancing princess who demands a prophet’s head on a silver platter. —Matthew Gurewitsch