Back to Bard for another dose of rare Richard Strauss. Scripted by Strauss’s frequent and finest librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Egyptian Helen spins hooey about the peerless beauty for whom Agamemnon led the Greeks to destroy Troy. In this ironic retelling (indebted to Euripides), the babe abducted to Asia Minor was a sort of CGI phantom installed in Asia Minor to fuel bloodshed between Achilles, Hector, and the rest of the cast of the Iliad. The flesh-and-blood wife of Menelaus sat out the 10 years of war under the supervision of a sorceress on a remote Egyptian isle. Post-Elektra, Strauss and Hofmannsthal took their mythology with giant pinches of ironic salt. Their wily sorceress Aithra pipes away in the stratosphere; down at sea level, in her palace, she tunes in to the freakish contralto dispatches of an Omniscient Seashell. Helen is one of the troubled yet rapturous soprano heroines of whom Strauss made a specialty. Leontyne Price set the recording studio on fire with her rendition of Helen’s postcoital effusion “Zweite Brautnacht” (My Second Wedding Night) and left it at that. In New York, chances to hear the full-length score have been rare in the extreme. Since the Met premiere starring the ravishing Maria Jeritza 98 years ago, a concert performance at Carnegie Hall in 1979 showcased the Welsh sensation Gwyneth Jones. In 2002, the American phenomenon Deborah Voigt brought down the house in another concert performance at Avery Fisher Hall, prompting the Met to pull out all the stops in a new production in 2007. At Bard, the torch passes to the dark horse Hailey Clark, whose repertoire encompasses Handel’s Alcina, Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, and Rachel in Halévy’s collector’s item La Juive. —Matthew Gurewitsch