Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta & Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle
Metropolitan Opera
January 29, 2015
Opening night (after snow delay)
After surviving a false alarm of a snowstorm and dodging a
handful of anti-Putin protesters picketing the Lincoln Square, we made it to
the Met for the opening of a double bill of two dreamy one act operas in two
unique new productions at the Met.
Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta
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| Iolanta: Eyes are only for crying Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
The story of a blind woman who has never been informed of
her condition. This is Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta.
She has been kept in isolation by her dominating father and has lived her whole
life up to now thinking that we have eyes only for crying. When an unsuspecting
stranger stumbles upon her home in the forest and he spills the beans about the
beauty of sight, she is overcome by shock. It is a woman’s journey from
darkness into light, with extremely poetic passages, such as the need to know
what to desire before being ready to receive it, as well as love’s
transformative force and a lot of nice stuff about the wonders of nature made
even more wonderful by the force of light. We are repeatedly reminded that
light was God’s first creation, and so religious symbolism is also very
present, though I wonder if it is significant that the doctor who performs the
miracle of restoring Iolanta’s sight is a Muslim gentleman. The opera is a cosmopolitan affair, set in France, sung in Russian, and featuring a Moroccan
doctor who invokes Allah, go figure.
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| Seeing the light with her heart Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
The cast was pretty solid across the board. Polish tenor Piotr Beczala as the evening’s prince
charming Vaudémont was strong and expressive, though his higher register is not
the most soaring. Yet I generally prefer Beczala’s Russian performances (think
last year’s Onegin) to his Italian roles (think Alfredo or the Duke), where his
articulation does not always feel so natural. Russian baritone Aleksei Markov, as his friend Duke
Robert, who is betrothed to Iolanta but in love with the sultry Mathilde, was
the best male singer on stage. We discovered him as Germont in La Traviata last week and were really impressed by his instrument. Here his role was much more
relaxed and carefree and his acting fit right in with his joyful, ardent
singing as someone who is young and in love. And of course Anna Netrebko starred as Iolanta. She embodied the heroine with a
remarkable innocence with her chesty voice that really flows with an effortless
fluidity in Russian. It was impressive to see her succeed in this frail, tender,
pure role after her uber-evil, unbridled force of nature performance as LadyMacbeth earlier this season. While the Russian soprano was vocally superb,
particularly in her soaring duet with Vaudémont on the beauties of nature and
light, I could not help but thinking that her voice is a touch too womanly for
such a child-like character. Bass Alexei
Tanovitski as the intransigent King Rene and baritone Elchin Azizov as the Moroccan doctor Ibn-Hakia were both solid
grounding forces of the opera, though not particularly impressive.
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| The skiers arrive Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
In Tchaikovsky’s hands (and under Valery Gergiev’s baton), sung Russian is phenomenally beautiful,
melodic and smooth. And considering its late romantic date (it debuted in
1892), the composer still gave us a number of moving melodic numbers, including
several dramatic arias and a couple of memorable duets with tunes that really
stick in your head. So much of it is really very dreamy and poetic, to the
point of being a bit soporific as it plods along at a somnolent clip, despite the
action packed second part of the short opera. In many ways, it reminded me of
the dreaminess and symbolism of Debussy’s impressionistic masterpiece, Pelleas et Mellisande.
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| Trelinski's idea of paradise Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
The Mariusz Trelinski’s
production was a bit disjointed, in the sense that it seemed to be set in a
desolate wasteland of a space in the mountains or in the woods with uprooted
trees strewn about around Iolanta’s little boxy wall-less house. So the general
vibe was a stark kind of sadness, yet characters entered the scene remarking what
a paradise the place is. I didn’t get it. It just didn’t work. Also, what was
Prince Charming doing in that get up? Beczala shows up in leg warmers and a
Uniqlo ultra-lightweight futuristic ski jacket and he just didn’t seem to fit
in the otherwise 1930s mountain cabin setting. Not only that but he comes
toting merrily a pair of skis, even though there isn’t a lick of snow anywhere
to be found. He seems to have stepped not only out of the future (a future with
high-tech affordable Japanese apparel) but also out of a different season. His
winter to her spring. Finally, when Iolanta is cured and happily marries, the
director’s idea of a visually exuberant and joyful ending is having uprooted
trees get grounded and a massive chorus of waiters pop out. Maybe I don’t get
Eastern European modern sensibilities, but that really did not work as a grand
finale.
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| Iolanta's apotheosis Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
I understand that there is some kind of profound spiritual
symbolism underlying Iolanta’s trajectory from darkness and spiritual insight
into the light, no matter how disappointingly stark reality is once you can
actually lay your eyes on it, but I just don’t see the full extent of these
concepts very compellingly played out in this particular staging of it. Maybe
it’s true what Anna Netrebko says about the opera in the liner notes to her recent recording of Iolanta for Deutsche Grammophon, namely, that it is not
actually necessary to stage it. The beauty comes through in just a concert
performance. The music says it all. Seeing with the heart, or, in the audience’s
case, with the ears, is more transformative than seeing with the eyes,
especially when what we have to look at is some half-baked trendy staging. A
good production should heighten the sense of the libretto and the score, it
should guide the audience to a deeper understanding of the subtleties and the
storyline, highlight the ideas, elevate the emotions. When a production muddles
the sense it can be most distracting.
Bartók’s Bluebeard’s
Castle
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| Judith steps into darkness Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
Bluebeard’s Castle could also be considered a story about a woman
overcome with the desire to see, the desire to know everything about her lover
whom she follows obsessively into his scary castle, abandoning all light and
hope behind her, almost in a Dantesque Inferno-entering manner. Through the
dark woods she traipses. Judith’s journey from light and freedom into darkness
and captivity is perfectly opposite Iolanta’s, neatly justifying the Met’s
choice to present these two works together.
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| Bluebeard's enthralling power Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
German soprano Nadja
Michael was stunning as Judith. She had dynamic stage presence, was very
agile (not surprisingly since she was once a competitive swimmer), and managed
to bring this character to life largely through her tormented and slightly
possessed acting chops. Nadja Michael didn’t always have music to sing through
which to express her character. Because the score is so relatively spare, she
had to rely on her physical presence on the stage to tell the story. Russian
bass Mikhail Petrenko as Bluebeard
himself was strong too. While we first discovered him as Galitsky in Prince Igor last season, here he looked and sounded like a completely different (and
much better) singer: darker, thicker, manlier and definitely scarier. Bartók’s score does not necessarily give
either of Judith or Bluebeard a lot to work with in terms of emotional vocal palette,
however, they created the unsettling atmosphere of the piece in a way that I
found riveting.
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| The journey through the castle begins Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
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| Welcome to my torture chamber Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
The production was very unusual. Mariusz Trelinski and his
design team went for a horror film look that incorporates projections and
electronic interludes that felt a little uneven but made for a very unique
evening at the Met. A welcome change of pace. Though here too what was staged
was often at odds with what is being stated or sung or declaimed in scary
voices on and off stage, I found this take much more captivating than this same
director’s approach in Iolanta. Bartók’s score lends itself to the creepy and
campy and horror of Trelinski’s imaginative, often surreal staging. It had a
very cinematographic feel, opening with a car approaching in the distance and
stopping at the edge of a forest at the very back of the stage. A tall blonde
woman, wearing a glamorous aquamarine silk backless evening gown, steps out of
the car and follows a moody, dark-haired mystery man, wearing a tux with an undone
necktie. They get through a dark, garage-like entrance, with glass walls
dripping with rain (the walls are crying), and from there the downward spiral
journey begins. We follow Judith in her quest through Bluebeard’s castle, from
an art deco elevator suspended on the side of the stage, to a butcher-like
torture chamber, a dreamy bathtub (supposedly representing the treasury, go
figure), a Hitchcockian dining room with blood stained flowers, soaring views
of a woodsy kingdom, a claustrophobic room tiled like a crossword puzzle (a
lake of tears?!?) and the final other-worldly scene in which Judith encounters
her own burial in the third person and the spirits of Bluebeard’s ex-wives.
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| An homage to Hitchcock's Rebecca Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
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| The Lake of Tears Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
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| The seventh chamber Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met |
The singers, especially Nadja Michael, really sold this
surreal and scary take. She had me on the edge of my seat the whole time. She
really got bodily into the role of the possessed wife who as it turns out seems
already to have died around the time that she ended up at Bluebeard’s castle,
where it was already her destiny to end up a prisoner with the rest of his
corpse brides and ex wives. And so her morbid curiosity to dig deeper into her
new husband’s pathological secrets after penetrating his blood stained torture
chamber and corridors with walls that cry suddenly makes some kind of sense
once we get to the end. Though the ultimate allegorical force of the whole
thing is never really fleshed out or spelled out. Trelinski gives us an out of
body experience in an almost Lynchian key, rather than a meditation on the
horrors of Europe in the midst of the Great War, which is the key in which I
have heard it read in the past. The continent had been through so much that no
one any longer wanted to see. In Bartók’s piece, a woman’s morbid curiosity
pushes past the point of widespread denial, in what was definitely the scariest
and most unusual opera we’ve seen so far.
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