RPO/Dutoit review – Bartók’s portrait of marital failure chillingly realised

It is often said that Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók’s one-act opera about marital failure, inhabits a theatre of the imagination and is just as much at home in the concert hall as on stage. Charles Dutoit’s performance with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the final work in a Hungarian-themed evening, was a fine reminder of its power to haunt and disturb by musical means alone.

Dutoit’s style, probing yet virtuosic, admirably suits the opera. He paced it with great care, emphasising the relentless quality that creates a gathering sense of unease. The climax came, as it should, with the epoch-making sequence of discords that precede the opening of the castle’s seventh door, rather than with the crash that accompanies the opening of the fifth, which is where some interpreters mistakenly place it. Bartók’s creepy orchestral palette, using persistent dissonance to indicate the omnipresence of blood, was chillingly laid bare. The RPO played it wonderfully well.

The indisposition of both scheduled soloists led to their late replacement by Willard White and Ildikó Komlósi. White played Bluebeard at Covent Garden in 2002, and it remains one of his finest roles, a carefully considered portrait of a man whose hauteur masks both the potential for violence and a deep loneliness of soul. Komlósi, a great artist, gave us the most complex and unsparing characterisation of Judith I can remember, as the initial mask of seductiveness gave way to a terrifying inflexibility of will.

The opera’s companion pieces were the Hungarian March from Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, flamboyantly done, and Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto. Marc-André Hamelin was the soloist in the grand manner performance of the latter, played with terrific weight and panache, but not quite disguising the unevenness of inspiration that characterises the work itself, its four-square final march above all.