straightforwardly thrilling aria<\/span><\/a>\u00a0didn\u2019t rouse the audience, who only stirred for Aleksei Markov as Robert and Piotr Beczala as Vaudemont.<\/p>\nThese upper-class twits arrived holding skis despite the absence of snow, but Markov brought a rough, bright impulse to the stage, like a freshly sharpened edge before you take off the burr. Beczala was more subtle and shapely, though occasionally strangely narrow. Robert\u2019s aria is about his frustration that he can\u2019t marry a more exciting woman because he was engaged to Iolanta as a child, while Vaudemont gets to defend a simpler feminine ideal that’s conveniently met by a woman who’s been kept in the dark. Iolanta’s purity seems to derive from her ignorance.\u00a0Beczala\u2019s performance of the aria, which Tchaikovsky added at the request of tenor Nikolay Figner, got the first applause.<\/p>\n
When Vaudemont accidentally breaks the taboo and tells Iolanta about colour and light, she defends her blindness, astonishingly, as no worse at detecting God\u2019s splendour. This\u00a0intriguing\u00a0idea is interrupted by King Ren\u00e9 and a search party with flashlights that caused temporary blindness and announced the bizarre finale. It starts well. Vaudemont is sentenced to death unless some unspeakably painful treatment by Ibn-Hakia succeeds. \u201cHe\u2019ll die if you can\u2019t see!\u201d We\u2019re riveted, then everything resolves. The tension evaporates and the remaining time is lavished on an asinine chorale that Trelinski takes \u00e0 la Book of Mormon with dazzling rays of light behind a marching chorus of caterers as snow flutters down. The last thing the audience did was laugh.<\/p>\n
Bluebeard slapped us back into the serious with a creaking\u00a0night-time\u00a0forest and a prologue (often-cut) growled in Hungarian by a heavy smoker. Then we saw Bluebeard taking his new wife Judith to their home, which is a garage in the woods with a serial killer vibe. This is where Judith sings of love and \u201cwarming the stones\u201d with her body.<\/p>\n
Nadja Michael and Mikhail Petrenko were irreproachable. It is a difficult opera propelled by its music, so a sense of acting, even of physical presence, doesn\u2019t come naturally. Bluebeard only echoes Iolanta with the lines \u201cWhat are roses? What is sunshine?\u201d But even if Judith won’t follow the thought, there is an interesting tension in this production between what we see in Bluebeard and what is described. Judith sings of treasure from a bathtub, of gardens from a dining room with a bouquet, and of a flat white sea from inside a cell. So who sees the truth\u2014her? Bluebeard? Or us? Iolanta raises the same question when she chastises Vaudemont for presuming that only the sighted can recognize God.<\/p>\n
Judith wants to know what is behind the seven locked doors of Bluebeard\u2019s castle and at first it seems that she will have to convince him, but he\u2019s handing over bunches of keys almost immediately. Bartok won’t release your attention; it\u2019s not clear who is in control and you don\u2019t give a damn about either character anyway. Eventually Bluebeard seems to get excited by the exposure, but when he echoes Judith\u2019s love lines it is with the\u00a0ardour\u00a0of a banker. Then he puts on a black glove and does Thing T. Thing\u00a0from the Addams Family, and even though it makes you cringe, you understand the director\u2019s desperation.<\/p>\n
When Bartok submitted his opera to competitions it didn\u2019t win despite his personal popularity, and research has shown that the indifference of Bela Balazs’s libretto disqualified the opera before its music could even be considered.\u00a0Trelinski tries intrusive projections, flippant strobe lights and recorded sounds to structure the narrative against the foggy resistance of the written work, but the visuals aren\u2019t complex enough to relieve a confused audience.<\/p>\n
The opening forest scene returns before each door is opened, which is in addition to the written transition scenes that Trelinski has set in an elevator. The grey shaft suits the industrial setting, but he doesn\u2019t do anything with the potential of Judith and Bluebeard trapped in cramped space. Escape is impossible but the seven doors just end up as a laborious catalogue of symbolist images\u2014until Bluebeard pulls Judith\u2019s body out of a fresh grave and kisses her, sending singing Judith to wander the forest with the spirits of his other murdered wives. The moment she pales and goes quiet is the strongest in the opera, which ended with light applause and a rush to the doors.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat was that?\u201d Asked my neighbour while she put on multiple generations of foxes. Good question, but I\u2019d see it again. Iolanta\/Bluebeard will be broadcast live on February 14th.<\/p>\n