Judith live from Munich

Conductor Oksana Lyniv
Production Katie Mitchell

Duke Bluebeard John Lundgren
Judith Nina Stemme

Judith:  Concerto for Orchestra in five movements / Duke Bluebeard's Castle by Béla Bartók streamed from Munich.

And now for something completely different.  Bluebeard is now a full length opera.  All the music is by Bartok, and I loved him more than ever.  We begin with a silent movie accompanied by the Bartok concerto for orchestra, where Detective Nina investigates a stalker who kidnaps women off the streets.  We have cell phones, cameras, computers, all the modern devices of criminology.  We have Bluebeard vaping.  This is followed immediately by the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle.  She tracks him down and frees his three prisoner wives.  I was surprised at how well the story fit this treatment.  It explains why she so aggressively insists on seeing all of the rooms.

I loved it.  When was an opera this exciting?  Except for Bluebeard himself, it was an all female production with a female conductor and director.  He gets it in the end.

I was completely drawn in to this concept and was happy to see the woman triumph in the end.  This could be the new wave.  I need to look into this.  It will be available on demand for the next month.

Bluebeard's Castle in HD

Nadja Michael and Mikhail Petrenko

I have finally seen the Bartok Bluebeard's Castle that was paired with Iolanta simulcast from the Metropolitan Opera on Valentine's Day.  I didn't feel they made a good pairing and felt I might enjoy Bluebeard by itself.  This seems to have been wise.  This is my fourth time with this opera since I started blogging (see here, here and here).

Bluebeard

Last night at the Mondavi Center was my third live Bluebeard's Castle since starting this blog. The first was at the Washington National Opera and starred Samuel Ramey and Denyce Graves. The second was at the Berkeley Opera and starred a giant computer screen.  Both of my previous Bluebeards made elaborate choices about what to show when the doors were opened. The drama shifted to these pictures.

Opera News once designated the libretto for Bluebeard as one of the best ever. Huh? First I would like to say that Judith is an idiot. I don't tend to go for operas where the main female character is an idiot. I guess I tend to prefer stories that actually imply some action. Here we just have a castle, seven doors which are opened one by one, and the idiot Judith.

The Davis production made some pretty interesting choices. Judith arrives in her wedding dress.  This tells us exactly where we are in the story. The dialog seems to say only that they have arrived at the castle and that she is leaving her family behind.

On either side of the stage at the Mondavi Center are doors, and these doors became two of the seven doors. That meant that the set required only five doors.

Thomas Munn, formerly the lighting designer for the San Francisco Opera, works now at UC Davis and designed the lighting here. The solution to the problem of what we see when each door is opened is lighting. Colored lights shine out of each door in turn and Judith describes what she sees.  The drama shifts back to the people.

Only when the seventh door opens does anything come out: Bluebeard's three previous wives still in their wedding dresses. They look like zombies, and Judith immediately turns into a fourth zombie and goes into the room with them.

The star of this opera is always Béla Bartók’s score.  I felt the orchestra was occasionally much too loud, covering the singers, but otherwise played well.  It seems different each time I hear it.  Bartók was a musicologist who collected Hungarian folk music, and therefore his music is always said to sound like Hungarian folk music. We have never heard any Hungarian folk music and will have to take their word for it. I always hear early modernism, ethnic only in the absence of German Romanticism but still carrying the burden of the classical orchestra.

The program notes point out the unusual writing for voices, always eight syllables per line with generally descending phrases, and no hint of ornamentation. Gregory Stapp as Bluebeard was ominous and imposing, but also sometimes out of tune. Jessica Medoff seemed to have just the right voice, manner and aura of arrogant youth for the idiot Judith.

I grow fond of it.

Computer Opera

You've all seen pictures projected on scrim at the opera house. This has been going on since Edison invented the light bulb and maybe longer. Now I have seen an opera where the entire set is a giant computer screen, like something Steve Jobs would use for a presentation. It was beyond my wildest imagination.

The opera is Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, sung in Hungarian and presented by the Berkeley Opera. Wow! There's no pit in the Julia Morgan Theater, so the orchestra sat behind the computer screen and the two singers -- Paul Murray as Bluebeard and Kathleen Moss as Judith -- worked in front. They kept contact with the invisible conductor through video monitors.

I'm actually getting to love this opera, sort of Bartók's own Pictures at an Exhibition. The seven doors open one by one and Bartók's music aurally portrays each scene. The drama lay primarily in the computer art playing on the screen behind the singers. From the outside the castle presents as giant ice blocks. Inside we see the damp stone walls Judith describes. Then fabulous half realistic / half abstract pictures show us what is behind each door as the music progresses from torture chamber, to armory, to treasury, to garden, to sweepingly vast and deserted kingdom, to an ocean of tears, and finally to Bluebeard's past three wives. Created by Naomie Kremer from photographs and computer manipulation of images that bleed and transform before our eyes, rather like a kaleidescope, it was a film to match Bartók's wonderful music, a visual treat.

What does it all mean? Does Bluebeard kill her? Are the other three wives dead? Does the presence of blood everywhere indicate death? Is Judith just there out of curiosity, or does she really love him? Or is it merely a ménage à cinque. The ambiguity is not resolved.

I was less satisfied with the performance of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Spells: A Lyric Fantasy in Two Parts) which came after. The boy, sung by Misha Brooks, seemed to be having trouble controlling his voice. It may be starting to change.

The production is very complicated and didn't always hang together. It involved ballet, puppets, and singers who stood along the side of the theater while the dancers created the visual aspect. There were frogs, a squirrel, cats, a bat, a dragonfly and a giant mama. Mama scolds the boy who then throws a tantrum and tears up everything in sight. I suppose the two parts are the scene inside the playroom where boy makes mayhem and the later scene out of doors where the animals get their revenge.

Behind the dancers and puppets is the same computer screen where some of the action is played out and atmospheres are created. I felt the artistic vision was less complete and less satisfying than Bluebeard.

WNO

I have gone suddenly from never having attended an opera season opener--in San Francisco this is a very posh affair--to having been to two in one week: New York City Opera and Washington National Opera.

WNO opened with a double bill of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. It is interesting to note that these two operas both premiered in 1918. There was a concern for continuity--both operas used the same huge spiral metal staircase (where are you going to put it?), the same chandalier, the same fluttering birds and the same images of ghosts. When Buoso dies at the start of Schicchi, his soul is seen ascending in an image that very much resembled the representation of Bluebeard's wives. The last piece of continuity is Sam Ramey who sang the title characters in both operas. He still sounds good, though I am hearing a wobble which he skillfully hides.

The presentation of Bluebeard was excellent, dark and mysterious. Bartók's music no longer sounds shocking. Judith, sung and acted marvelously by Denyce Graves, is a young woman consumed by curiosity. She cannot resist the impulse to find out if the rumors about Bluebeard are true. Once she discovers that they are, he strangles her.

A single large door represented the seven doors. My favorite was when the garden was revealed and it was part of a Rousseau painting. There is a Rousseau painting that could have worked for the moonlit landscape as well. Too bad they didn't think of it.

It was the best Bluebeard I've seen but not the best Gianni Schicchi. It has one good aria and a happy ending.

[See Kinderkuchen History 1890-1910]