But that is where the compatibility ends. The idea of pairing Bluebeard with Carl Orff’s dreadful De temporum fine comoedia ( Play on the End of Time) makes sense fleetingly when the tuned percussion echoes the harsh half-scale runs of Bartók’s opera. The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester responds to Currentzis with slavish devotion, rendering the softest of pianissimi, the creepiest of sound effects Bartók wins. We are drawn into this symbolic world partly through the feverish intensity of Ausrine Stundyte’s Judith, partly through Teodor Currentzis’s fanatically detailed reading of the score. A dead baby makes the most dubious of props, clutched by Judith and occasionally handed to Bluebeard. Rather than being a wife-murdering despot, her Bluebeard is a gently puzzled husband, trying vainly to support his new spouse through a psychological crisis. Darkness, water and fire define the castle and form the stage for a frantic Judith’s battle with herself. For Castellucci, motherly love is born from guilt, a regressive take on original sin. In the darkness before Bartók’s music starts we hear a baby cry, and then a woman wailing. His staging of Bluebeard’s Castle is black, black, black. Castellucci, in the opening production of this year’s Salzburg Festival, has concealed them behind a mammoth black curtain. Almost every production in this theatre carved from rock makes use of the stone alcoves that frame the stage. In a strange kind of party trick, Romeo Castellucci has made Salzburg’s Felsenreitschule disappear.
0 kommentar(er)
