John Relyea as Duke Bluebeard and Ekaterina Gubanova as Judith. Photo: Michael Cooper
Reviewed by James Karas
The Canadian Opera Company is wrapping up its current season with a triumphal revival of Robert Lepage’s 1993 productions of Béla Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung.
Lepage, Set and Costume Designer Michael Levine and Lighting Designer
Robert Thomson give both operas dark, forbidding, mysterious and frightful
atmospheres. Indeed the world they create is surreal, psychotic and
incomprehensible.
Bass John Relyea is an impressive and imposing Bluebeard. Dressed in a
buttoned-up officer’s uniform, he looks like an aristocratic gentleman. Relyea
has a deep, rolling voice that is expressive and threatening but shows
tenderness as well. He has a house full of horrors but he keeps asking Judith
if she is afraid. The opera leads inevitably towards the sixth and seventh
doors that will seal her fate as the wife of the Duke. Relyea gives an impressive
performance vocally and looks like a self-possessed, mysterious, aristocrat who
hides much evil and many secrets behind a civil façade.
Mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova is a strikingly blonde Judith who
insists that she is not afraid of the Duke and that she loves him. Her driving
curiosity pushes her to the final door of the castle where she will find her
position in the Duke’s universe.
Gubanova showed great emotional intensity as she moved from one door to
the next. Her voice was not always as strong as one would have liked, but she
gave a signature performance in a tough role.
Lepage sets Bluebeard’s Castle in
early twentieth century Europe. For both operas the stage is set in a gold frame
and darkness dominates every scene. The seven doors of Bluebeard’s castle are
shown as silhouettes of brightly lit keyholes on both sides of the stage. A concrete
wall dominates the right side of the stage and Judith opens the doors on the
left side.
We see mostly Judith’s reaction to what lies behind the doors except
when she opens the fifth door and we see a vista of the Duke’s empire projected
in a kaleidoscope of colours.
Blood is a central image in the opera but Lepage does not dwell on it.
There is blood on Judith’s wedding dress and there are projected images of blood
but darkness remains the overriding impression.
It is a stunningly well-sung, well-conceived and well-produced staging of
the opera.
Krisztina Szabó as the Woman. Photo: Michael Cooper
Erwartung (“Expectation”) is a one-act monodrama in which a
Woman is searching or expecting a man, her lover. She is searching in the dark
with the same concrete wall as in Bluebeard
as a main feature of the set.
There is a man in a white coat taking notes for a while and people
emerge horizontally from the wall. There is a cot on the stage that looks very
much like a hospital bed. The woman is hallucinating or is mentally disturbed.
We do not know as she continues her search and finds a man. He is her lover but
he apparently has a mistress.
Schoenberg wrote some extraordinarily dramatic music for this opera that
keeps you enthralled for the half hour that it lasts.
Mezzo soprano Kristina Szabo goes through all the emotional permutations
that the Woman suffers with powerful singing and acting. This is opera in a
different dimension.
The two operas take two hours to perform including an intermission. They
have many points in common and Lepage’s production capitalizes on them to give
us a unified whole of two different works.
The COC Orchestra under Johannes Debus produces outstanding performances
of Bartok’s and Schoenberg’s complex music.
The result is a great night at the opera.
____
Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartok and Erwartung
by Arnold Schoenberg opened on May 6 and will be performed seven times
until May 23, 2015 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, 145 Queen
Street West, Toronto, Ontario. Tel: 416-363-6671. www.coc.ca
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