The Bartók Balance: Senza Sangue and Bluebeard's Castle at Hackney Empire
Senza Sangue and Bluebeard's Castle
Opera Grand Avignon and the Opéra-Théâtre de Metz Métropole
Hackney Empire
Upper Circle F25, upgraded from unreserved Gallery, £15
19 September 2017
Hackney Empire page
Richard was musing enlighteningly about the challenge for a composer of ensuring both consistency and variety, and while that's worth thinking about all the time it was particularly pertinent, to me, in this double bill.
The Bartók could almost be an exercise in how to achieve that balance perfectly: every musical gesture is obviously part of the whole, while the narrative demands a display of variety to which the music responds lavishly. I adore this piece and it was excellently performed here by Péter Eötvös and the Pannon Philharmonic Orchestra and singers Bálint Szabó and Adrienn Miksch. Such wonderful sounds. I was mildly annoyed that the very explicit imagery in text and music was largely ignored by the director, but who really cares when the music has such meat.
I struggled epically with the first work of the programme, though neither Richard nor David agreed. To my ears, Eötvös's Senza Sangue suffers from an imbalance towards consistency, manifested in a deathly disconnect between the action on the stage and the action in the music. The score contains many wonderful sounds of glorious invention, but of such indifference to the narrative and their place within the piece as a whole that they bleed meaning. Perhaps this is what Eötvös was going for but I was mire-sunk. I'd like also to blame the staging, which seemed to me almost laughably crude, and the singers, who while sounding good sang with minimal musical inflection, but maybe this also was the point. Fortunately solace awaited me after the interval.
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