Showing @ Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Edinburgh until Sun 25 Aug @ 19:15
A delicate court entertainment and a brutal fairy tale might not seem the most natural of bedfellows but Frankfurt Opera have chosen to display these two pieces together, each exploring the themes of love, devotion and death. It’s a combination that in lesser hands could have proved disastrous. Here, the experience is captivating.
Henry Purcell‘s opera opens proceedings, a frothy affair decked out in ice-cream colours. There’s great emotional range from the entire company, with genuine tenderness displayed by Dido (Paula Murrihy) and Aeneas (Sebastian Geyer) in their declarations of love, later falling foul of a cruel code of honour. The witches, portrayed by a trio of superb counter-tenors, provide unsettling comedy, kicking up their black skirts and shaking their poker straight hair.
By contrast, brutal starkness descends for the final scene. The cast slowly exit the theatre, followed by the entire orchestra, until we are left with a distraught queen alone on stage, emitting half strangled gasps as her death rushes towards her.
We return to a stark industrialism. The design for Bluebeard’s Castle eschews the traditional fairy tale aesthetic and settles on something more chilling. A two-handed opera by Béla Bartók, the performances by Robert Hayward and Tanja Ariane Baumgartner are all-consuming, each pouring out their souls. Baumgartner combines innocence with steely determination, whilst Hayward gives us an emotionally crippled Bluebeard, a dying beast capable of immense cruelty.
Bluebeard is a harder watch, purely because the subject matter remains extremely disturbing, and the relationship between husband and wife is petrifying. But the technicality and passion of the singing is matched by enormous ingenuity in the staging. Strings of flowers are pulled from suit sleeves and mute members of the company suddenly see their jackets become soaked, as the tears of Bluebeard’s former wives flow down their backs. An imaginative playfulness dances throughout these productions. It’s a beautiful accompaniment to two contrasting tales of the darker sides of human love.
Showing as part of the Edinburgh International Festival 2013