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It is appropriate that the score of Bluebeard should be in a certain way superficial — there is nothing to be learned about it from looking for connections, motifs and so forth. Its appeal is nonetheless lasting, because it is so beautiful and so right for the depiction of Bluebeard’s riches of possession and personality. Petrenko has two virtually ideal singing actors in Petra Lang and Albert Dohmen. Lang’s voice retains its warmth, she is a consummate actress, engages the audience’s sympathy while making it obvious how exasperating and painful it is for Bluebeard to be pressed ever further. Dohmen isn’t a big boomer, but he is an intelligent and impassioned declaimer of the Hungarian text, which presumably he doesn’t understand literally. The setting, in the rocks and ruins of his castle, with a fallen chandelier, is not helpful but it gives the atmosphere of central European Symbo-lism of the period before and during which this work was conceived.
The set is taken over into Schoenberg’s Erwartung, and with The Woman dressed just as Judit was, and The Man actually present and mobile, and looking like Bluebeard, it is meant presumably to suggest that Schoenberg’s work is the sequel to Bartók’s. The idea is nonsense, if only because while in Bartók everything is explicit and exposed, in Schoenberg we are decisively in Freud’s world, where everything signifies something it isn’t, and there is incessant indirection and omission. That gives Angela Denoke a hard job, because she has to cope with Schoenberg’s inordinately difficult vocal line and the demands of the role, while looking as if she is in the opera we saw before the interval — perhaps that is why the interval is so long. She does her considerable best, with a voice a little less full than one would like, and the effect of this brief work is still pretty powerful, as it is almost bound to be — but it would be much more powerful yet if it were wholly detached from its companion piece.
Not having seen Welsh National Opera’s Don Giovanni before, I went down to Cardiff for its revival. Michal Klauza conducts a lucid, fairly broad account, with plenty of attention to detail. What I missed is the manic or even ferocious element which is in this opera as in none other of Mozart’s, and which has indeed gradually been drained out of it over the last few decades.
Katie Mitchell’s production, revived by Elaine Kidd, is simple and almost always to the point, though it’s a mystery to me why the Don and Leporello should be in drag — black evening gowns — for the ball in Act I. The cast is almost uniformly excellent, with a smooth rather than rapacious Don from Christopher Purves — I can imagine, and would prefer, a different and more alarming account of the role from him. The opera is set in the mid-20th century, for no discernible reason other than that in 1996, when this production had its first outing, most operas were set then. It’s easy, if you see a particular opera fairly often, to develop an idée fixe about it, and mine about Don Giovanni is that we seem to have lost belief in it, while Così benefits from our disloyalty. This production didn’t dislodge my idée, but as Giovannis go, this is probably the best I have seen in a decade.
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