The first night time of English Nationwide Opera’s Bluebeard’s Citadel (billed as a “live performance semi-staging”, although there’s significantly extra to it than that) turned out to be distinctive, startling and utterly unforgettable, thanks in no small measure to the weird circumstances that surrounded it. Allison Prepare dinner, solid as Judith, withdrew from the efficiency late within the day due to sickness. With solely two hours’ rehearsal, Jennifer Johnston sang, not from the facet of the stage, as one would possibly count on, however as a costumed, albeit largely motionless presence inside Joe Hill-Gibbins’s manufacturing. The position was acted, in the meantime, splendidly effectively, by Crispin Lord, one in every of ENO’s employees administrators, good-looking but androgynous in a white singlet and silk skirt, in order that Bluebeard’s ultimate associate, in a outstanding twist, successfully turns into his husband slightly than his spouse.
Bypassing at a stroke the perceived gender polarities that inform Bartók’s examination of marital disintegration, the top result’s without delay strikingly erotic and profoundly unsettling, significantly inside the context of Hill-Gibbins’s chillingly lovely staging.
John Relyea’s Bluebeard and the actor talking the Prologue (Leo Invoice) are without delay doppelgangers and alter egos, and Invoice stays on stage all through, calmly supplying Bluebeard with what lies behind the unseen doorways of his fortress, as Relyea, going through Lord throughout an enormous eating desk, begins to disintegrate beneath the sexual and emotional stress of all of it. On a regular basis objects tackle frightful resonances as cutlery turns into weaponry and wine turns to blood. Not like some administrators, who go away the gore to the viewers’s creativeness, Hill-Gibbins isn’t squeamish, and the stage is quickly awash with it. By the top we have now been painfully introduced nose to nose with the amassed detritus of Bluebeard’s life, however it’s Judith who truly has blood on his/her palms, not he.
A lot of it sounds formidable. Johnston, in a protracted overdue ENO debut, makes an impressive Judith, fastidiously matching vocal inflection to Lord’s bodily gestures, her tone caressingly lovely in moments of affection, manipulative or in any other case, however turning from honey to metal in a flash as her calls for for Bluebeard’s keys turn into terrifyingly insistent.
That is Relyea’s second Bluebeard in London, after his memorable 2021 efficiency with Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic on the Southbank. He’s extra reined in right here, fractionally extra sorrowful, and tellingly conscious, virtually from the outset, of the approaching emotional disaster that he’s powerless to stop. As soon as previous a low key begin, conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya builds the stress inexorably, putting the climax not on the well-known opening of the fifth door (overpowering although it’s), however with the grinding dissonances that accompany Bluebeard’s yielding to Judith’s calls for to provide her the important thing to the seventh. The taking part in – the brass fierce, the strings wealthy and darkish, the woodwind slithery like blood – is superb.
