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Bluebeard
Descent into darkness … Robert Hayward and Tanja Ariane Baumgartner in Bluebeard's Castle at the Edinburgh festival. Photograph: REX/Duncan Bryceland
Descent into darkness … Robert Hayward and Tanja Ariane Baumgartner in Bluebeard's Castle at the Edinburgh festival. Photograph: REX/Duncan Bryceland

Dido and Aeneas/Bluebeard's Castle – Edinburgh festival 2013 review

This article is more than 10 years old
Festival theatre
Frankfurt Opera's stylish and astutely directed double bill succeeds in shining new light on both Bartók and Purcell

These operas don't normally go together. Their tragic heroines sing music composed more than 200 years apart. One is festooned in pretty pink, paralysed by claustrophobia and love sickness; the other wears glossy black and paces an open stage in pursuit of dark truths. In his courageous and fascinating pairing of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, director Barrie Kosky inverts our expectations, doesn't force parallels and treats the power dynamics of the central couples with an unusually even hand so that we're left pondering the murky nature of victimhood. Frankfurt Opera's stylish production has its flaws, but overall succeeds in exactly the way that a double bill should: it makes sense of each work and shines new light on both.

What brings them together conceptually is space. The Carthaginian queen is confined to a sliver of stage, hemmed in by her cloying subjects but ultimately alone. Judith faces the opposite trauma on a vast white revolve that plays out the symbolic castle of Bluebeard's soul. There are no walls and no doors to hide behind.

Kosky's gestures are almost always astute. Cartoonishly camp witches pick a feud with Dido over the handsome Aeneas (Sebastian Geyer), and their grotesqueness sets the central pair in dignified contrast. Bluebeard is vulnerable and retreats to foetal position, while the strident Judith in turn soothes and stalks him. There are some surprisingly literal gimmicks – Bluebeard lookalikes drip water to represent a lake of tears – and Kosky is most effective at his most straightforward. That Bluebeard and Judith end up exactly where they started fits Bartok's cyclical harmony and deepens the sense of horror that this fairytale is far from over.

Musically things are patchy. Conductor Constantinos Carydis draws sprightly period-instrument Purcell, but comedy bassoon lines and lurid string slides are a gratuitous touch. The stripped-down baroque singing is good but not great, the exception being Paula Murrihy's Dido: her voice has a rough-hewn honesty, her acting is magnetic and her lament is full of pathos. The Bartók is generally stronger, with Robert Hayward's resonant Bluebeard, a formidable performance from Tanja Ariane Baumgartner's Judith and a plush orchestral palette. Carydis glosses over too much, though: the mighty opening of the fifth door – which reveals Bluebeard's vast kingdom and marks the great climax of the work – passes in a flash, as does Bluebeard's tender description of his former wives. If we're to believe his capacity to love, this troubling passage is crucial.

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