Leipzig and Dresden are both staging Elektra. Which city wins?

Yet more performances of Elektra, Richard Strauss’s setting of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ramped-up, neurosis-riddled 1903 reworking of Sophocles, are unlikely to force any anniversary-year reassessments of the composer. But the piece’s current ubiquity does reflect the fact that we’re now relatively well off for singers equipped to tackle the fearsome title role. At their head, arguably, stands the German soprano Evelyn Herlitzius. She’s yet to make her Covent Garden debut, inexplicably, but her riveting performance galvanised the opening night of the first high-profile new production of the work in 2014, at Dresden’s Semperoper, where it shocked and awed its first audience 105 years ago. Re-opened in 1985, the reconstructed theatre boasts a glorious acoustic and one of Germany’s classiest old orchestras, the Staatskapelle, with Christian Thielemann, in charge. More or less concurrently, Peter Konwitschny’s 2005 production, first seen in Copenhagen, was being revived down the road in Leipzig. And while that city’s 1950s opera house can’t match Dresden’s for historic aura, it’s appealingly airy and business-like and features the no less wonderful Gewandhaus Orchestra in its pit.