Scottish Opera, 08/04/2017
Lliam Paterson : The 8th Door
Bartók : Duke Bluebeard's Castle
Vanishing Point
Orchestra of Scottish Opera
Sian Edwards
There's no denying that Bluebeard's Castle is a difficult piece to match, simply because it's such an extraordinary, harrowing work. It holds its own highly successfully in concert, indeed my best recollection of it was precisely that, conducted by Boulez in 2001. Yet the music is so evocative, so poetic, that one also longs for the images. This is the third time that Scottish Opera has staged it; the first time they chose to pair it with Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, the second time (which I didn't see) with Schönberg's Erwartung. The only other time I've seen it staged (other than the Met's broadcast last year), it was the Hungarian State Opera, and they had brought along their ballet company too, for The Miraculous Mandarin. I'm afraid I don't recall the opera on that occasion, but have a vivid memory of the ballet - not an ideal response, really, though in many respects it's possibly the best combination.
However, for this set of performances, Scottish Opera has taken a quite different approach, and in collaboration with the theatre company Vanishing Point, commissioned a new work specifically designed as a pendant to the Bartók. Lliam Paterson is a young Scottish composer, and with director Matthew Lenton devised The 8th Door to be performed before Bluebeard's Castle, as a prequel of sorts, going by the notes provided, for the 8th Door does not follow the 7th, but precedes the 1st, it is the door to the Castle.
What we got was something more like an art installation than an opera and, to be honest, I think that if this piece is to survive, it might do better on the concert platform than in theatrical performance. Not that it was bad, but a little overlong, and what I saw on stage seemed curiously divorced from what I heard from the pit. At times, I realised that I would have liked to be listening more closely to the music that watching what was happening on stage.
When the lights go up, you see a woman and man sitting with their backs to the audience, facing compact video cameras, as if about to make one of those little personal vlog-presentations for a dating site. At the back of the stage, a large screen shows the image from the cameras, cutting back and forth between His and Her faces. Indeed, at the start, you're very much put in mind of a blind date; you're seeing each through the other's eyes, so to speak, and at first there is shyness, growing sympathy, some reticences, more on Her part than His, progression to intimacy, first doubts, then She appears to make some kind of momentous confession which leaves Him dumbstruck, and fading into darkness. At the end, although Her face is still visible on the screen, She gets up and walks off into a ray of light from the side.
Technically, it's quite a tour de force for the two actors, Gresa Pallaska and Robert Jack, with only minutely detailed facial expressions to work with, and those put under intense scrutiny. They did appear to have a text to say, which did not, I think, correspond to that being used by the singers, but my lip-reading skills are nil, and my seat was such that my view of their mouths on the screen was obscured by Mr. Jack. However, the story-telling was clear enough, and when, at the very end, Bluebeard introduces his first wife, and the supertitles speak of her red dress (although that's not actually a translation of the Hungarian he sings), we suddenly realise it's the same woman.
Meanwhile, however, in the pit, Paterson has six singers and an orchestra a little smaller than that for the Bartók, and texts by four 20th Century Hungarian poets, both in the original Hungarian and in English translations by Edwin Morgan. The texts were quite dark in tone, often concerned with various forms of isolation or incomprehension, and a wide variety of vocal techniques, much of the spectrum between full song and speech, was used. Paterson's music was quite attractive, though I've no idea how characteristic this piece is of his general style. There were moments when I thought I was reminded of something, but I never quite caught it, being too distracted by the visuals, while once I got a distinct whiff of Bartók's The Wooden Prince, which was not unreasonable given the context. However, the texts being presented did not seem to relate to what I was seeing, and I've been left with a nagging feeling I should have been listening much more carefully to the score rather than wasting my time with the mute show on stage, which is, frankly, a little aggravating. Hence my comment above about the piece possibly doing just as well, and maybe better, in concert as in the theatre.
The staging for Duke Bluebeard's Castle was, at first sight, a comfortably prosperous modern home, set inside the frame of a large U tipped on one side, the open end, evidently, facing out towards the audience. There were no visible doors, save the last, but the effects were produced mostly with lighting, and a progressive shattering of the mundane setting by extraneous and unsettling elements. Shards of shining steel quietly slide out of the furniture for the armoury, the treasury is represented by a long, shimmering shower of gold dust, while the garden is both a hazy video impression in the background, and thick, flowered vines intruding into the living space. Then, for the great blaze of the Fifth Door, the rear of the U splits with a great rift, the two halves sliding apart and away, exposing a snow-capped mountain range, gradually subsumed under the lake of tears of the Sixth Door, as it becomes clear that we are looking up at the surface from underwater. The images are strong, even beautiful at times, although the couple itself remains visually relatively prosaic from start to finish.
Lenton provides no answers to the questions of Bluebeard's Castle, but he lets the questions stand forth quite clearly, to be interpreted however you choose. Bluebeard is not especially sinister, nor Judith particularly manipulative, their drama is one of the perception of love. How do they love each other? As they are, as they would wish to be seen, as they would wish the other to see them, as they should be.... Every couple has to find those answers for themselves, and for some, for many, it ends up being too great a challenge, incomprehension outweighing comprehension. Lenton does not even make Judith actually join the other wives, but there is no question at the end of the irrevocable separation of the couple.
Casting of the couple can vary wildly; Judith can be either a soprano or mezzo, Bluebeard, baritone, bass, or bass-baritone. The darker timbres suit Bluebeard better, as long as he can produce the big lyrical flows of the Fifth Door and the Seventh Door, while with Judith, it's a matter of swings and roundabouts. With the mezzo voice, you gain in warmth and richness of colour, but there is the matter of that top C, and also, you need some serious heft to the voice, because it doesn't usually have the brightness of timbre to help carry it over a substantial orchestra. However, there are always exceptions - I can think of a few sopranos who were a disappointment when it came to the C, and Karen Cargill, as a seasoned Wagnerian, certainly wasn't going to have problems making herself heard. Nor did she fall short at the Fifth Door, not just with the high note, but a sudden, wonderful quality of stillness in the wan responses to Bluebeard's paean to his lands. Robert Hayward, also a Wagnerian, delivered this splendidly, and was a noble-voiced, quite stoic Bluebeard, in the face of Cargill's somewhat more histrionically inclined Judith.
They were both somewhat limited in physical mobility, mostly due to the fairly cramped set space - even after it splits, they generally had to stay within the floor area of the original room, until the end when the other wives are released - but vocally both were very expressive, while from the pit, Sian Edwards was taking no prisoners. This was the best playing I've heard from the Scottish Opera orchestra in years, vivid, expansive, revelling in the textures of the music. Edwards clearly expected her singers to deliver in terms of volume, because she was holding nothing back in the orchestra, and the results there were little short of spectacular. I doubt that Scottish Opera has truly resolved the issues of staging Bluebeard's Castle, but the initiative was unusual and interesting, and the performance of the Bartók left little to be desired.
[Next : 9th April]
Bartók : Duke Bluebeard's Castle
Vanishing Point
Orchestra of Scottish Opera
Sian Edwards
There's no denying that Bluebeard's Castle is a difficult piece to match, simply because it's such an extraordinary, harrowing work. It holds its own highly successfully in concert, indeed my best recollection of it was precisely that, conducted by Boulez in 2001. Yet the music is so evocative, so poetic, that one also longs for the images. This is the third time that Scottish Opera has staged it; the first time they chose to pair it with Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, the second time (which I didn't see) with Schönberg's Erwartung. The only other time I've seen it staged (other than the Met's broadcast last year), it was the Hungarian State Opera, and they had brought along their ballet company too, for The Miraculous Mandarin. I'm afraid I don't recall the opera on that occasion, but have a vivid memory of the ballet - not an ideal response, really, though in many respects it's possibly the best combination.
However, for this set of performances, Scottish Opera has taken a quite different approach, and in collaboration with the theatre company Vanishing Point, commissioned a new work specifically designed as a pendant to the Bartók. Lliam Paterson is a young Scottish composer, and with director Matthew Lenton devised The 8th Door to be performed before Bluebeard's Castle, as a prequel of sorts, going by the notes provided, for the 8th Door does not follow the 7th, but precedes the 1st, it is the door to the Castle.
What we got was something more like an art installation than an opera and, to be honest, I think that if this piece is to survive, it might do better on the concert platform than in theatrical performance. Not that it was bad, but a little overlong, and what I saw on stage seemed curiously divorced from what I heard from the pit. At times, I realised that I would have liked to be listening more closely to the music that watching what was happening on stage.
When the lights go up, you see a woman and man sitting with their backs to the audience, facing compact video cameras, as if about to make one of those little personal vlog-presentations for a dating site. At the back of the stage, a large screen shows the image from the cameras, cutting back and forth between His and Her faces. Indeed, at the start, you're very much put in mind of a blind date; you're seeing each through the other's eyes, so to speak, and at first there is shyness, growing sympathy, some reticences, more on Her part than His, progression to intimacy, first doubts, then She appears to make some kind of momentous confession which leaves Him dumbstruck, and fading into darkness. At the end, although Her face is still visible on the screen, She gets up and walks off into a ray of light from the side.
Technically, it's quite a tour de force for the two actors, Gresa Pallaska and Robert Jack, with only minutely detailed facial expressions to work with, and those put under intense scrutiny. They did appear to have a text to say, which did not, I think, correspond to that being used by the singers, but my lip-reading skills are nil, and my seat was such that my view of their mouths on the screen was obscured by Mr. Jack. However, the story-telling was clear enough, and when, at the very end, Bluebeard introduces his first wife, and the supertitles speak of her red dress (although that's not actually a translation of the Hungarian he sings), we suddenly realise it's the same woman.
Meanwhile, however, in the pit, Paterson has six singers and an orchestra a little smaller than that for the Bartók, and texts by four 20th Century Hungarian poets, both in the original Hungarian and in English translations by Edwin Morgan. The texts were quite dark in tone, often concerned with various forms of isolation or incomprehension, and a wide variety of vocal techniques, much of the spectrum between full song and speech, was used. Paterson's music was quite attractive, though I've no idea how characteristic this piece is of his general style. There were moments when I thought I was reminded of something, but I never quite caught it, being too distracted by the visuals, while once I got a distinct whiff of Bartók's The Wooden Prince, which was not unreasonable given the context. However, the texts being presented did not seem to relate to what I was seeing, and I've been left with a nagging feeling I should have been listening much more carefully to the score rather than wasting my time with the mute show on stage, which is, frankly, a little aggravating. Hence my comment above about the piece possibly doing just as well, and maybe better, in concert as in the theatre.
The staging for Duke Bluebeard's Castle was, at first sight, a comfortably prosperous modern home, set inside the frame of a large U tipped on one side, the open end, evidently, facing out towards the audience. There were no visible doors, save the last, but the effects were produced mostly with lighting, and a progressive shattering of the mundane setting by extraneous and unsettling elements. Shards of shining steel quietly slide out of the furniture for the armoury, the treasury is represented by a long, shimmering shower of gold dust, while the garden is both a hazy video impression in the background, and thick, flowered vines intruding into the living space. Then, for the great blaze of the Fifth Door, the rear of the U splits with a great rift, the two halves sliding apart and away, exposing a snow-capped mountain range, gradually subsumed under the lake of tears of the Sixth Door, as it becomes clear that we are looking up at the surface from underwater. The images are strong, even beautiful at times, although the couple itself remains visually relatively prosaic from start to finish.
Lenton provides no answers to the questions of Bluebeard's Castle, but he lets the questions stand forth quite clearly, to be interpreted however you choose. Bluebeard is not especially sinister, nor Judith particularly manipulative, their drama is one of the perception of love. How do they love each other? As they are, as they would wish to be seen, as they would wish the other to see them, as they should be.... Every couple has to find those answers for themselves, and for some, for many, it ends up being too great a challenge, incomprehension outweighing comprehension. Lenton does not even make Judith actually join the other wives, but there is no question at the end of the irrevocable separation of the couple.
Casting of the couple can vary wildly; Judith can be either a soprano or mezzo, Bluebeard, baritone, bass, or bass-baritone. The darker timbres suit Bluebeard better, as long as he can produce the big lyrical flows of the Fifth Door and the Seventh Door, while with Judith, it's a matter of swings and roundabouts. With the mezzo voice, you gain in warmth and richness of colour, but there is the matter of that top C, and also, you need some serious heft to the voice, because it doesn't usually have the brightness of timbre to help carry it over a substantial orchestra. However, there are always exceptions - I can think of a few sopranos who were a disappointment when it came to the C, and Karen Cargill, as a seasoned Wagnerian, certainly wasn't going to have problems making herself heard. Nor did she fall short at the Fifth Door, not just with the high note, but a sudden, wonderful quality of stillness in the wan responses to Bluebeard's paean to his lands. Robert Hayward, also a Wagnerian, delivered this splendidly, and was a noble-voiced, quite stoic Bluebeard, in the face of Cargill's somewhat more histrionically inclined Judith.
They were both somewhat limited in physical mobility, mostly due to the fairly cramped set space - even after it splits, they generally had to stay within the floor area of the original room, until the end when the other wives are released - but vocally both were very expressive, while from the pit, Sian Edwards was taking no prisoners. This was the best playing I've heard from the Scottish Opera orchestra in years, vivid, expansive, revelling in the textures of the music. Edwards clearly expected her singers to deliver in terms of volume, because she was holding nothing back in the orchestra, and the results there were little short of spectacular. I doubt that Scottish Opera has truly resolved the issues of staging Bluebeard's Castle, but the initiative was unusual and interesting, and the performance of the Bartók left little to be desired.
[Next : 9th April]