Trailer:
Well, could have put Bluebeards Castle but as will be shown, it was more than that. Comments on each of the two parts were made immediately after viewing.
So, first part of Bluebeard from Munich just done - a stunning Katie Mitchell creation - but this first partwas a film to the 'accompaniment' of the Concerto for Orchestra. A noir film where a chauffeur, intially seen very carefully cleaning a car, collects a woman from a dating site (a photographer), takes her back to a lavish apartment (she having passsed out in the car from drinking a spiked drink) where she has her nails carefully if not fetishily painted in vivid red (some of the very few colours in the night-based and dark film) and the hands then carefully covered in plastic. She is then taken to some sort of storage place...I think
At the same time, a policewoman (is this Judith?) is working on a missing women case, comes across the site, recognises the women (and the important detail of them all wearing, somewhere, a small gold cross) and having accessed the previous characters photographs, tracks down the car.
She then puts herself on the same site the other women came from and is collected by the same car - but she does not drink the spiked drink.
This part of the story was really quite quickly done but necessarily so, I suspect. it worked on the screen though.
A fascinating way to develop the opera; my only complaint that we occasionally diverted from the film to see the screen in the opera house which briefly, but totally, broke the dramatic spell being well created and seemed rather pointless.
Anyway, now on to the opera...
The Opera
Fantastic. Superbly thoughtful re-working that both got across the power of the work and its ambiguity. Throughout it was seen very much as a Bluebeard/Judith power struggle, with forst one, then the other getting the upper hand; Judith finds forensic traces of blood in the garden, but the torch (and her recording equipment) is found by Bluebeard. It seems towards the end that she is in danger of being seduced by bluebeard, even after having rescued the other wives.
The modern equivalences for the various rooms - a series of gloomy chambers gradually revealed - worked wonderfully well. The only thing I did not know was whether as the rooms were revealed, the other rooms stayed in view. I suspect not but there was a superb sense of dread as they went further and further into the castle/chamber of horrors.
Of the updatings, the musical climax with Judith seeing the vast lands and estates of Bluebeard was the most effective with Judith experiencing them through a VR headset with the images projected on the screen behind her. And this was a wonderful contarst with the claustrophobic and dirty rooms that we had seen up until then. Even the garden was just an illuminated small patch of ground. Super idea -and it matched the ecstasy of the musi which is alwasy tricky to do, from a staging point of view I think, as almost nothing can truly match that stunning C major (?) scene.
Taking this work as a nor story was a superb idea and it made absolute dramatic sense with the constant questioning of Judith being the 'interrogation - and the final pieces of evidnce (the last two rooms which he refuses to unlock) being the final pieces in the jigsaw which the criminla refuses to give up but which are absolutely essential for a successful conclusion of the case.
Wonderful. Any other production though, may well now seem rather inadequate!
Duke Bluebeard: John Lundgren
Judith: Nina Stemme
Conductor: Oksana Lyniv