Bloody ‘Bluebeard’ scores a knockout punch
Where was all that blood coming from?
Not just any orchestra would send its audience off to their Ubers pondering such a grisly question. But the Houston Symphony dramatically closed its 2018-19 classical season with a psychologically intense performance of “Bluebeard’s Castle,” Béla Bartók’s two-character 1911 opera based on the European folktale about a wealthy duke with bizarre taste in interior design.
Forbidding and dark, often gripping, “Bluebeard” is generally interpreted as an expression of the inner turmoil experienced by Bartók, the Hungarian-born composer who confessed to bouts of “spiritual loneliness.” But get past the torture chamber and blood dripping from the walls, and this opera is romantic in the same way as an Anne Rice novel or a Sisters of Mercy album.
Goth is a good look for this orchestra, it turns out.
“Bluebeard” is barely an hour long, so conductor and music director Andrés Orozco-Estrada took advantage of the extra time by using the program’s first half to introduce some key collaborators, including a narrator and two dancers. Chief among them was Adam Larsen, a cinematographer by trade listed in the program as “Creative Director.”
Projected on three curtainlike screens composed of iridescent white fibers, his designs were a step or three beyond the color waves rippling across the ceiling during the “Aurora” violin concerto earlier this month. One of the first images Larsen introduced was a page from the score noting when the “night wind sighs down endless, gloomy labyrinths.” Later, this effect was reproduced at appropriate moments by a discreet wind machine.
Other screens showed cages and chains to represent the castle’s torture chamber, then pikes and axes for the armory. Orozco-Estrada also took the opportunity to point out crucial elements of the score to listen for, most importantly the motif that appears every time blood appears, which is a lot. (Not everyone comes to the pre-concert lectures given by musical ambassador Carlos Andrés Botero, which always impart similar information, but they should.)
None of this multimedia alchemy, though, would have worked quite so well without two such dynamic, well-matched performers in the leads. Matthias Goerne sang Bluebeard — or “Kékszakállú,” in the original Hungarian — with a forceful, thrusting baritone that projected effortless authority but, if necessary, could temper it with surprising tenderness.
He keeps insisting his latest bride ask no questions, an ultimately reasonable request for this couple’s most peculiar honeymoon. But as Judith, named for the Biblical-era Jewish widow who saves her people by decapitating an Assyrian general, mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung would not be deterred, not even when Bluebeard said things like “it is cool and sweet when blood flows from an open wound.”
Instilling her voice with the same luminosity and warmth as her gown of wedding white, Judith maintained her poise as Bluebeard opened one door after another in the castle: an environment that, musically and mentally, could politely be described as “unsettling.” Not until the seventh swung open to reveal Bluebeard’s final surprise did notes of doubt and apprehension appear in her voice. Given all the blood Judith has seen by this point, it probably wasn’t what she was expecting.
In orchestrating Bluebeard’s musical tour of his castle, Bartók pushed the orchestra’s tonal possibilities to their absolute limit (especially for 1911), starting with the foreboding opening notes scratched out by cello and double bass. A martial trumpet and snaredrum reports signified the armory; radiant harmonies matched Hansen’s golden hues as the couple passed through the treasury. Violins wept and sighed in the sixth room, a lake filled with tears and ripples of twin harp.
The score was riddled with action as well as atmosphere, growing brusque and insistent whenever the time came for Judith to knock on another door. If “Bluebeard’s Castle” were assigned an overall color, it would be deepest purple, the color of royalty, and a bruise.
The true showstopper, however, came in the fifth room. At last the dank, cramped castle yielded to a window that offers a stunning vista of Bluebeard’s mountainous dominion, bathed in whitegold rays and matched by a crescendo of heaving brass and pounding tympani.
And just before the clouds could return to cast more “bloody shadows,” DeYoung reared back and hit a bull’s-eye of a high C that marked a high point of not only the concert but the season now just past as well.