| IOLANTA/BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE - last night | |
| Last Edit: singleticket 02:17 pm EST 01/25/19 | |
| Posted by: singleticket 02:12 pm EST 01/25/19 | |
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| An engaging night of dark fairy tales and symphonic playing from the Met orchestra. This is the first time I've seen Mariusz Treliński’s double bill of the Tchaikovsky/Bartok operas. I thought Treliński, who directed this revival, did a remarkable job with IOLANTA and a less successful job with BLUEBEARD. Sonya Yoncheva and Alexei Dolgov (Polenzani's last minute replacement) were solid. The ensemble very strong in what is essentially an ensemble piece. And Treliński’s direction of the ensemble also very strong and detailed. In the orchestra pit, Hungarian conductor Henrik Nánási brought out exquisite orchestral textures and musical characterizations in Tchaikovskys score. All in all, a delight and my first introduction to Tchaikovsky's last, rather mystical opera. Treliński's BLUEBEARD felt like a sketch compared to the more finely realized IOLANTA. And it had some dubious choices like a whole sound design of haunted house sound effects which along with the oddly placed scene shifts gave the opera a clunky, less unified feeling. The sound effects really got on my nerves. I'm not against adding sound design to opera but an opera like Bartok's already has a whole tonal world that we're immersed in. That aside, Treliński's take on the opera was a legitimate one, if a little obvious. Treliński's BLUEBEARD is a journey into Eros/Thanatos or the beautiful and erotic pull of death. Judith more or less assists in her undoing which is supported by the text. Bluebeard is a sometimes willing and unwilling accomplice. There were some unsettling and fascinating ideas that again seemed sketched in that I would have liked to have seen expanded further; particularly Judith's connection to Bluebeard's previous wives as a kind of weird organism made up of magnetic poles of attraction and repulsion with its own (same-sex) erotic and deadly pull. Spooky! I was split on Henrik Nánási's performance in the orchestra. In many ways it was as good as it could be and the Met orchestra never sounded more like a first class symphony but it left, I felt, the singers in the background, it treated them almost as an afterthought. That might have also been Treliński's staging which, unlike the earlier opera, pushed much of the action farther upstage and also the relative strengths of the singers. Angela Denoke and Gerald Findley were convincing actors with Denoke's musical performance being much more convincing than Findley. Still, this BLUEBEARD felt more like a performance of a symphony than an opera. Nánási and the MET orchestra almost made me happy to settle for that. |
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