Bartók - Judith/Duke Bluebeard's Castle (Munich, 2020)

Béla Bartók - Judith/Duke Bluebeard's Castle

Concerto for Orchestra (1944), Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1918)

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2020

Oksana Lyniv, Katie Mitchell, Grant Gee, John Lundgren, Nina Stemme

Staatsoper.TV - March 2020

Bartók's one-act opera is often paired with another short work which, whether it's as an accompaniment or integrated to expand on the themes of the work, inevitably colours and has a bearing on the content. And in Duke Bluebeard's Castle themes and undercurrents abound. Rarely however is Bartók paired with one of the composer's own works, mainly because he only composed this one brilliant short opera. La Monnaie in Brussels however managed a fairly successful pairing of Duke Bluebeard's Castle with the composer's 1924 pantomime ballet The Magnificent Mandarin, adding a little commentary on the main short opera, even if there was little obvious connection between the two works.

Katie Mitchell takes a different approach in the Bavarian State Opera's pairing of the Bartók's 1918 Duke Bluebeard's Castle with the much later Concerto for Orchestra, written in the United States in 1944, the two works combining to create a single work, Judith. In Judith the Concerto serves as a musical prelude to the opera, the production using a film by British director Grant Gee that sets the scene for a modern reinterpretation of the opera. Being directed by Katie Mitchell however, you can assume there will be a feminist take on the subject and some might see that as a necessary reading that certainly wouldn't be out of place for this work.

Unfortunately, as far as coming up with a new modern spin on the subject the idea and the execution is again (after Mitchell’s attempt to correct Shakespeare’s chauvinism in The Tempest through Miranda) somewhat lacking. The Concerto for Orchestra is used as the score for a crime-thriller movie, setting the scene of Bluebeard  as a sinister city executive in London, scouring an escort agency site that specialises in more mature women, selecting victims that are picked up and brought to him by his chauffeur. Police detective Anna Barlow (Nina Stemme) finds a clue in photographs uploaded by one of the women and goes undercover posing as 'Judith'.

It’s not a terribly original or complex idea but it takes 40 minutes of the Concerto to lay this out. Grant Gee's film is attractively shot in the Southwark district, an area south of the Thames currently being extensively redeveloped, but there is no sign of any real artistry here. There's nothing that provides any motivation or explores the psychology of a predator of women. The Concerto is lovely to listen to, but it doesn’t particularly match with the drama in the film either. It’s much too long as a prelude which does nothing except provide a reason why a woman would willingly following a path that has led to the disappearance of other women. It could have been covered equally as well with a five minute prologue or with a few title screens.

Once we get to Bluebeard's Castle however it has to be said that the sense of menace, danger and the sinister edge of the environment is well achieved. Judith does have a mission to "warm this icy stone" with its weeping walls, breach its ramparts and expose the nature of Bluebeard. The seven doors are visible on security monitors and, as a police detective, Anna has good reason to want the keys to open those rooms. It's fitting that she finds a torture chamber in the first room and a weapons room in the second. Well, what else would you expect to find in the home of a serial killer? The third room also has a sinister aspect, a strong room with a safe, filled with jewellery, trophies stained with blood that undoubtedly belongs to his victims.

As dark as its origins and underlying psychology might be, doesn't turning Duke Bluebeard's Castle into a banal crime-thriller take away somewhat from the original fairy-tale? Well evidently that's exactly what Katie Mitchell wants to do, to demolish any suggestion that the fairy story is about a weak woman's curiosity about the sexual experience of her husband and her helplessness in the face of the power of his masculinity. There's nothing natural about 'Bluebeard's Castle', it's an artificial construct, the lands of his dominion here nothing more than a VR projection, a trick to impress and instill respect. His power is the abuse, mistreatment and enslavement of women. Like Miranda and Lessons in Love and Violence however I'm not sure putting a gun into the hands of a woman to regain power is quite the image to overturn and correct any imbalance.

Bartók's opera is a powerful work in its own right, impressive in its musical flow and expression, working on abstract and allegorical levels, hinting at dark sinister acts, appalling secrets and twisted desires. It's created for two powerful voices to explore and the Bayerische Staatsoper has two such superb performers here in Nina Stemme and John Lundgren. Not only is the singing top class, but the performances are well-acted with a cat-and-mouse interplay, each hiding something, truths gradually being revealed or realised about each other. Whether you view that on a cop/criminal or male/female level, it does capture a sense of the imbalance of power, or where the balance of power is perceived to be.

Former assistant to Kirill Petrenko, the musical direction by Oksana Lyniv is excellent, maintaining an intensity that matches what is happening on the stage. Alex Eales' set design is also very impressive for a work that relies on establishing the right mood. Coming in from the underground garage the bridges the film with the opera, the set remains below ground one room leading to the next, sliding into place. It creates a sense of an enclosed claustrophobic environment, threatening and entrapping with no windows and no natural light, the castle as a projection of Bluebeard himself. Reservations about viewing it as a crime-thriller movie aside, the performances of Stemme and Lundgren in this environment make this every bit the titanic encounter it ought to be.

Links: Bayerische Staatsoper

Bartók - Bluebeard's Castle (Dublin, 2018)

 
Béla Bartók - Duke Bluebeard's Castle

Irish National Opera, Dublin - 2018

André de Ridder, Enda Walsh, Joshua Bloom, Paula Murrihy, Elijah O'Sullivan

The Gaiety Theatre, Dublin - 13 October 2018

The new Irish National Opera's inaugural season is promising to be an ambitious and varied one, and not just in terms of repertoire and touring productions; they've also taken the opportunity to draw on Ireland's tremendous singing, musical and theatrical resources. For Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle sung in Hungarian, a work that for all its brevity is no mean challenge, the Irish National Opera have called upon playwright Enda Walsh to direct the production.

Walsh is no stranger to opera, having worked as librettist and director on Donnacha Dennehy's The Last Hotel and The Second Violinist, and he brings some familiar touches to Bartók's darkly fascinating Duke Bluebeard's Castle. The director comes to the work apparently with some preconceptions, but finds that such a work inevitably exerts it own power and meaning, and in a way he manages to deliver on both proposals.

It's not as if the underlying moral of Bluebeard's Castle is difficult to work out. Judith comes to the Castle as the new wife of Duke Bluebeard and wants to know everything about her husband, all his dark secrets, good and bad, and Bluebeard has quite a reputation, not least for the unknown fate of his previous wives. Walsh puts emphasis on the allegorical aspect of Judith wishing to open the seven locked doors of the castle and shed some light into its dark corners, adding sound effects of creaks, groans and eerie noises that suggest something terrifying lying in those inaccessible recesses.

In terms of creating atmosphere and tension, it's highly effective and complementary to Bartók's menacing score, but Walsh also sees the opera as an exploration of a couple who are just getting to know each other, testing out each other's limits and seeking to establish dominant roles. The old-fashioned gender distinctions are still there, but dropping Duke from the opera's title and dressing the couple in modern clothes, Walsh wants to use them consider how this applies to a modern marriage and whether there is indeed any significant difference in who literally holds the keys to the relationship.

Emphasising the allegorical, there's no physical opening of doors in Jamie Vartan's set design other than the fissure that runs down the middle of the formidable solid-looking stone wall at the back of the stage. The revelation of the other rooms, revealing masculine obsessions with power, money and violence, are shown in those abstract terms as projections and shifts of light and colour, putting emphasis not on their allure but on some sense of horror and shame that lies behind their acquisition.

All of this builds up of course to the sinister mystery of what lies behind the seventh door and, as I've said, Enda Walsh - following along with the slow mounting tension and blasts of horror in Bartók's score - builds the tension superbly with great attention to atmosphere. There really is a sense of mounting dread as the wall parts to reveal what is behind the final locked door; and the revelation is chilling (almost literally, as you can feel the cold air rush forward from the back of the stage of the Gaiety Theatre). Bluebeard's three wives emerge, confronting Judith with the knowledge that Bluebeard has also had deep relationships with other women, something that she needs to know, but once she does (and in the light of revelations of Bluebeard's true nature from the other rooms) it forever changes how she sees her husband.

The decision to dress the three gothically pale former wives in dusty faded 18th century ball gowns doesn't really fit with the modern aesthetic elsewhere in the production, but that's almost certainly intentional. If Walsh is applying the allegory of Duke Bluebeard's Castle to a modern relationship, the fate of Judith to similarly accept the old-fashioned attire of the previous wives only emphasises the reality that nothing has changed, that the distinctions and roles remain largely the same as they have been since the dark ages. The allegorical nature of the work allows room to consider the moral as not quite simplistic as all men are domineering aggressive brutes with dark silent desires and women are fatally victim of their own insatiable curiosity and pushiness.

Walsh perhaps can't risk leaving it on that note, so there is another revelation lying deeper within the seventh room, one that explains the significance of the young boy at the start of the opera (padding out the short length of the one-act work) by building a speaker and delivering an additional message in English before the traditional Hungarian prologue. The revelation of abandoned children sitting among ruins could be a reference to the disturbing proclivities of Gilles de Rais, the real-life inspiration for Duke Bluebeard, but it also opens the hermetic relationship drama out to the realities of how those dark urges for power, money and violence can lead to miseries elsewhere in the world.

If this idea was going to work it really needed the full support of the musical and singing forces and there was much to offer and impress on that front. Conductor André de Ridder perfectly controlled the wide dynamic of the work allowing space for the drama to work within it, but also insuring a wide spacial dynamic within and outside the pit for the harp on one side and the booming percussion up at the back of the other side of the stage. Paula Murrihy's Judith was delivered with lyrical and dramatic conviction and Duke Bluebeard was well characterised by Joshua Bloom. His warm timbre was underpinned by a steely defiance that managed not only to be menacing, but seductive and even loving, particularly when describing the qualities of his three previous wives. The results were thrilling and chilling.

Links: Irish National Opera

Bartók - Duke Bluebeard's Castle / The Magnificent Mandarin (Brussels, 2018)

Béla Bartók - Duke Bluebeard's Castle / The Magnificent Mandarin

La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels - 2018

Alain Altinoglu, Christophe Coppens, Ante Jerkunica, Nora Gubisch, Gábor Vass, Vincent Clavaguera-Pratx, Merche Romero, Brigitta Skarpalezos, Dan Mussett, Norbert De Loecker, Amerigo Delli Bove, James Vu Anh Pham

La Monnaie Streaming - June 2018

When you read about the atrocities committed by the real-life inspiration for Bluebeard, it seems a little tasteless to make his story the subject of a fairy tale or an opera. Rather than focus on the horrors of what really took place in the castle of Gilles de Rais, the dark fairy tale story has become more of a cautionary tale on how a woman attempts to break down defensive barriers of masculine power and control in order to engage love and self-awareness but falls victim in the end to her own feminine weaknesses of curiosity and jealousy. That's one interpretation anyway, but there is a certain amount of ambiguity played with there as well as a sense of horror at what can lie in the darker recesses of the human psyche. Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle does actually explore that quite successfully.

It's a beautifully structured and concise piece, gifted with a score from Bartók that is precisely attuned to its moods and darkness, yet, it's not so precise that it can't also convey the ambiguity that allows it to work on a number of levels. That character is very much emphasised by the diabolically-intoned spoken-word introduction which leaves it open whether what take place on the inside or the outside. Are we looking at Duke Bluebeard's Castle as a place of horror or do the seven locked rooms of the castle rather a symbolical representation of the inner life of Duke Bluebeard?

The latter, the symbolical and the allegorical, is very much to the fore in La Monnaie's production directed by Christophe Coppens, the former artist and fashion designer who has returned to his theatrical roots and who was first involved with opera in La Monnaie's version of Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen, (which they retitled 'Foxie!'). The castle is a grid of nine rooms, with Bluebeard at its centre unable to move, unreachable, wrapped in the castle constrictor-like grip. Judit's appearance and fearless willingness to explore breaks down this barrier on the opening of the first chamber, but Bluebeard still remains confined to a wheelchair until he is finally freed. Freeing Bluebeard however might not be such a great idea.

The set design highlights that this freedom is one of breaking down barriers to self-awareness or self-reflection by making this a castle of mirrors. Every surface is mirrored, but angled and distorting. It's dark, cold blue, turning to red as Judit recognises that everything in each of the rooms is covered in blood. The chambers themselves are of course symbolic of what lies in the deeper recesses of the male psyche, bathed in violence, avarice and secrecy, closing down human feelings, hiding a lake of tears and sentiments of love in the seventh chamber. It's the idea that Bluebeard might harbour those feelings for other women that proves to be an open door that the woman can never close once she has become aware of it. Some things are better not knowing.

As a staging and representation Coppens' direction and designs are effective enough, if not really spectacular, daring or revealing of any new ideas or insights. It remains a fairly static production, with only Judit moving slowly between one room and the next. The lighting brings emphasis to the music, saving its big moment to chime with Bartók's grand theme for the opening of the fifth chamber. It's in the musical performance really that the work lives, and Alain Altinoglu finds that epic quality in the work, the dark fairy-tale and the dark allegory. It's a work for great singers too, and Ante Jerkunica and Nora Gubisch bring out its chilling stridency.

What is good about the production however is that it doesn't just view the partnering piece as an entirely separate work, but uses Bartók's The Magnificent Mandarin - composed in 1924 - to also to highlight and add further commentary on Bartók's short 1918 opera - his only one - Duke Bluebeard's Castle. It's a welcome change for seeing Duke Bluebeard's Castle paired with another short one-act opera like Iolanta or La Voix Humaine, and even as a ballet-pantomime, The Magnificent Mandarin is a much more complementary piece than you would first imagine, and perhaps even allows both works to gain something in the pairing.

If Duke Bluebeard's Castle is all symbolism of suppressed and internalised emotions, repressed sexual desire and violence, those characteristics are made explicit to some extent in The Magnificent Mandarin, where an unscrupulous brothel manager assaults and robs clients and pays for his crimes when he murders a Chinese Mandarin. Coppens accordingly revisits the dark chambers of the castle as the colourful and brightly lit rooms of a brothel, where we can voyeuristically see those behaviours carried out in the Technicolor style of Hitchcock's Rear Window. This might perhaps account for Bluebeard appearing again at the conclusion in his wheelchair, as otherwise there's no direct overlapping or reference between the two parts of this production.

I say explicit, but it's actually highly stylised, very much in the cartoon come to life quality that Coppens used in Foxie! The Cunning Little Vixen. That doesn't mean however that it can't get across the intent of the piece, the sensuality and the violence that rises to the surface, and it's often quite clever and imaginative in the designs, such as one of the prostitutes wearing a skirt of legs that dissolve into a blur of body parts in her tryst with the Mandarin. Again it's Bartók's music that is highly expressive and it's matched much more precisely to the dancer's movements and actions, delivered with like precision and expression by Alain Altinoglu's conducting of the La Monnaie orchestra.

Links: La Monnaie

Eötvös - Senza Sangue/Bartók - Bluebeard’s Castle (Armel, 2016)

Péter Eötvös - Senza Sangue/Béla Bartók - Duke Bluebeard’s Castle 

Opéra Grand Avignon, 2016

Péter Eötvös, Róbert Alföldi, Nadine Duffaut, Romain Bockler, Albane Carrére, Adrienn Miksch, Károly Szemerédy

Armel Opera Festival/ARTE Concert

Based on a psychological revenge thriller by Alessandro Baricco, Péter Eötvös' short one-act opera Senza Sangue might not seem to have much in common with Bartók's Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, but the pairing of the works by the two Hungarian composers proves to be complementary. The connections and commonalities between the two works are further emphasised by the conducting of both by Péter Eötvös in this Opéra Grand Avignon production for the Armel Opera Festival.

Effectively, Eötvös has reduced Baricco's novel down to its final confrontation, bringing the intensity of what has gone before entirely into a conclusion that is short on drama but filled with tension and intriguing implications. Nina has tracked down a man she has been looking for, a 72 year old lottery ticket seller called Tito who formerly went under the name of Pedro Cantos. 52 years ago he was one of three men who killed her father and he is now the only one left alive. Nina invites the man for a coffee where she reveals that she was present when her father was killed, and she believes it was Pedro who fired the first shot.

From the conversation that takes place between the man and the woman - the dramatic action of the opera not really consisting of much more than that - we are led to believe that Nina has spent her whole life tracking down the three men, and may have been responsible for their deaths, but reduced down to the conclusion alone Senza Sangue becomes much more than a revenge story. It's about a young life that has been destroyed by war, condemned to live in hatred for the rest of one's life, shaped by this one terrible event. "Even if life has no meaning, we go through it with one desire", Nina tells the man, "To return to the hell that created us".

If there's not much in the way of drama, the accompanying music by Péter Eötvös delves much deeper into this troubled soul. The music is tonal, but dark, slow, twisting and stripped down of ornamentation. Not surprisingly, considering the subject, it reminds the listener of Strauss's Elektra, moods fluctuating and rising to the surface in surges, always with ominous undercurrents. The music doesn't just take in the woman's view however, but contrasts it with the man's perspective. There's hesitancy in its flitting, dancing, confusion but with a thread of acceptance underpinning the fear that this day would eventually come. But there's also a measure of challenge to the woman's viewpoint.

The story is evidently not as simple as it seems, and Eötvös's music and the setting probe this further. The man does not attempt to condone his killing of Nina's father, but he does make the point that it was done in a time of war. He was a soldier, he was fighting to build a better society. Vengeance runs both ways. Moreover, he was aware of the young child in the room, saw her hiding and let her live. The tone between the man and the woman gradually changes the more they discuss and come to understand each other. For all the lack of drama and the 'talky' nature of the treatment, Senza Sangue is a subject as operatic as they come, all the more intense for being played out between two people. Péter Eötvös has room to explore these characters in this situation for all the complexity and nuance of their positions and does so brilliantly in this fascinating work.

Senza Sangue is well paired here with Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle. Seen together, the commonalities are obvious, both short one-act operas, both detailing a situation between a man and a woman where there is much more going on beneath the surface than the obvious, the music of both works highly attuned to the psychological or the symbolic underpinnings. Perhaps most significantly - although Senza Sangue is in the Italian language of its source novel - both works are by Hungarian composers.

Conducting his own work as well as Bartók's, Eötvös emphasises the musical connections between the works, or perhaps it might be more a case that he adapts Bluebeard to make it a little more complementary to the tone and the intent that has been established in Senza Sangue. This is not the harsh, jagged, disturbing inner-world of Bartók's dark score, but rather a more sensitive reading that likewise strives to find a neutral position between Judith's troubling inquisitiveness and Bluebeard's admonition to "look but don't question". Like the lesson in Senza Sangue, you won't always find the answers that you want, or worse, you can risk creating the hell you are trying to escape.

Directed by Róbert Alföldi (Senza Sangue) and Nadine Duffaut (Duke Bluebeard's Castle) for the Armel festival, the stage production for both works is clean, simple and neutral, reflecting the neutral position of the musical treatment of the subjects. Other than a gun being shown in the hands of the woman at the start, there is little in the way of props in Senza Sangue, the real drama taking place on an inner psychological level. It's much the same with Duke Bluebeard's Castle, with only sinister figures in the background and semi-abstract projections for each of the rooms adding to the disquieting, sinister undercurrents that come with the peeling back of the psychological layers. The imagery remains, surprisingly but appropriately for the purpose of this production, rather bloodless - senza sangue.

The singing is excellent throughout, noninflected, expressive of character without over-emphasis, allowing those ambiguities and uncertainties within the personalities and the subject to remain. Romain Bockler as Pedro in Senza Sangue was the only competition singer and held all the dramatic tension well alongside Albane Carrére's Nina. Adrienn Miksch and Károly Szemerédy took those personalities a stage further in Duke Bluebeard's Castle, the careful dance between probing and wariness leading to a fraught situation that demands a resolution, although not necessarily lead to the desired outcome.


Links: ARTE Concert, Armel Opera Festival

Tchaikovsky - Iolanta / Bartók - Duke Bluebeard's Castle (Met, 2015 - Live in HD)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Iolanta
Béla Bartók - Duke Bluebeard's Castle
 
The Metropolitan Opera, 2015

Valery Gergiev, Mariusz Treliński, Anna Netrebko, Piotr Beczala, Aleksei Markov, Ilya Bannik, Elchin Azizov, Nadja Michael, Mikhail Petrenko

The Met Live in HD - 14 February 2015

Whether by accident or design, the Met's Live in HD Valentine's Day broadcast featured two one-act operas that explored two different sides of love, one where love is bathed in light, the other shrouded in darkness. I guess if the programming was by design it might not have been a little more predictable and you might have expected Gonoud's Romeo et Juliette or - at a stretch - Tristan und Isolde. The pairing of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, never before performed at the Met, with Bartók's challenging Duke Bluebeard's Castle was much more ambitious, and with a fine musical and production team in place, it was an impressive indication of what the Met can achieve when they really make the best use of the resources and talent available to them.

There are some obvious superficial connections between the two works - both are fairy-tales and both involve a female protagonist who must overcome a domineering male figure in order to achieve fulfilment in her love life. In the interal interview during the live cinema broadcast, director Mariusz Treliński proposed a further connection that helped him link the two works, seeing Judith in Duke Bluebeard's Castle as a grown-up version of Iolanta from Tchaikovsky's opera. That doesn't really come across in any obvious attempt to suggest that they are the same person, but there's no doubt that by looking at it that way, it allows some themes in the first work to be explored in greater depth in the second.

The director uses all means at his disposal to try to tease out the underlying metaphors of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta. Or at least he seems to, but it becomes clear by the time we get to the Bartók work that he has left quite a bit in reserve for the deeper exploration of the more overt psychological-probing of Duke Bluebeard's Castle. For Iolanta, the world of the blind girl is beautifully realised, her bedroom a revolving open-box set within a dark wood, with occasional projections, sometimes symbolic (a faun skipping through the woods), sometimes abstract. Significantly, when Iolanta can't tell a red rose from a white rose, those projections are entirely black and white.

This is significant in a number of respects, since much of Iolanta is about perception. Iolanta's blindness is a metaphor for not seeing the outside world as it really is, being caught up in her own inner world and an idealisation of love. Her blindness, we also discover, cannot be cured unless she wants to see for herself. Of course, in Iolanta's case, that not necessarily the young girl's fault, as she has been isolated and protected from the outside world by her father King René to the extent that she isn't even aware that she is blind. The fairy-tale is not without its dark side - what proper fairy-tale isn't? - but the resolution is pretty much black and white, the light of her love for Vaudémont allowing her to see and accept the world and the people around her for who they really are.

There are no such black and white matters in Béla Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle, and no pretense of the story being anything but a metaphorical exploration of female psychology and dark sexual desires. The menacing voice-over narration at the start tells us that it is the inner world that we are delving into here. And, in a way, it is true that Judith is a more grown-up version of Iolanta. The innocence is gone, and Judith goes to live with her new husband Duke Bluebeard despite his fearsome reputation for his treatment of young women, even more drawn to the darker aspects of his masculinity than the idealistic light of love. Judith is however simultaneously attracted and appalled by the dark recesses that she discovers in Duke Bluebeard's 'castle'.

Judith, more mature than Iolanta (Perrault's fairy-tale also more open about the dark impulses that underpin such stories) believes she can handle the truth now. She wants to leave no door unopened as far as her husband is concerned, but is horrified by the visions of what is revealed as she is given the key to unlock each of the rooms. Despite the warnings of never going near that darkest, locked seventh room - the secret of Bluebeard's sex life in his relationships with his previous wives - Judith can't help but curiously probe into things she would be better off not knowing about. She discovers more than she wants to know and the knowledge cannot be unlearnt. She too is trapped in Bluebeard's castle.
 

In line with the more psychological probing and the darker outcome of the second tale, Bartók's 20th century musical language for Bluebeard is also far away from Tchaikovsky's fairy-tale music, far more ambiguous and unsettling. As far as director Mariusz Treliński is concerned about the relative impressions that each work evokes, it's as different as black-and-white to colour. All the richness of Tchaikovsky's music is there in the setting for Iolanta but the tones and brightness are pure, but Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle requires a much more complex range of colours and effects. This is impressively achieved for a one-act opera, Boris Kudlička's set designs sliding into place, working with the lighting and projections to evoke a distinct quality for each of Bluebeard's rooms, as well as for the symbolic nature of what they represent.

This is extraordinarily ambitious, and - particularly in the handling of Duke Bluebeard's Castle - I've never seen anything quite like it at the Met. Conceptually, as a whole, it all works remarkably well, the pairing of the two works allowing one to feed off the other. Whether one gains more than another from the contrast and juxtaposition doesn't matter - it will be different for every individual viewer how they respond to each of the works - but it undoubtedly allows the viewer to see both works in a new light. That's undoubtedly a lot to do with the direction here which really probes the situations and the characters, but there is complete interaction between all aspects of the production, between the creative team and the performers which is just as vital to its success.

Aside from the challenges of the stage design, it's Valery Gergiev who has to take the orchestra from Tchaikovsky to Bartók and find commonality between the works or at least make them complementary. Like Treliński, he finds the fairy-tale aspect of the stories as a basis to work with, contrasting the shimmering otherworldliness of Tchaikovsky's score - with which the Russian conductor clearly feels an affinity - with the harder-edged factured realities of Bartók's music. Both works also benefit from contrasting but equally committed performances from Anna Netrebko as Iolanta and Nadja Michael as Judith. Michael can be wildly variable depending on the role she is playing, but here in her Met debut role, she was highly impressive. With Mikhail Petrenko an outstanding Bluebeard, Iolanta was almost put into the shade by the duo in the second work. Ilya Bannik however give a strong performance as King René in Iolanta, but I found the reliable Piotyr Beczala a little bland here this time.

Links: The Met Live in HD