The beginning of glorious bodies – Newspaper Kommersant No. 216 (7417) of 11/22/2022

The Perm Opera and Ballet Theater hosted the world premiere of the performance based on a score both famous and unfamiliar: composer Valery Voronov wrote the prologue and epilogue for Bela Bartok’s opera The Castle of Duke Bluebeard. What was the updated Bartók in the interpretation of director Evgenia Safonova, conductor Fyodor Lednev, the orchestra and soloists of the theater, tells Yulia Bederova.

The new score, commissioned by the theater with the assistance of the Aksenov Family Foundation, sounds like an “extended Bartok”. Expanded not so much in chronological terms as in aesthetic and semantic terms, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle has already become one of the most anticipated premieres for at least two reasons. Firstly, this is the operatic debut of director Yevgenia Safonova: her work in the drama (Medea, Austerlitz, Insensibility and others, marked by a radical renewal of both stage language and ideology) was called by critics without saying a word “the theater of hearing “. With the name of Safonova, the intervention of a new director’s generation in the Perm Opera, announced back in 2019, seemed especially organic, but it acquired a distinct intrigue: how does dramatic hearing transform into musical? Another disturbing question hung in the air when it became known that Bartok would take the stage not in his natural form, but framed by the new music of Valery Voronov, at the beginning of the 2000s – a member of the SoMa composer group, which thundered both music and manifestos, and in 2010 -e almost disappeared from Russian use. Voronov’s works, sometimes appealing to the avant-garde of the early 20th century in different ways, were performed mainly on the Minsk and German stages.

One of the features of The Castle, written in 1910 by friends and like-minded Bela Bartok and librettist Bela Balazs (modernists, folklorists and poets in the broadest sense of the word), is that the score does not last long by theatrical standards (a little over 50 minutes), and theatrical conventions imply that the audience spends the evening in the theater, and not some part of it. Therefore, since the day of its premiere in 1918, The Castle has been played most often in tandem with other stage (or not) works by Bartók or with other people’s equally compact operas. There is still an authoritative theatrical tradition of recomposing or recomposing the original, but such cases are mainly associated with scores that have been partially lost. Bartok is obviously not the case. And somehow it will sound with appendages, will its authentic integrity be affected?

But no. The expanded (in other words, huge) Bartók’s orchestra took a spectacular place on the expanded stage: the pit was raised, a couple of rows of stalls were removed so that the orchestra would fit between the auditorium and the extremely narrowed, uncomfortable stage box. And, starting with a ghostly, magical chord in complete dramatic synchrony with the image on the dark video wall of the castle (a delicate work of media artists Alina Tikhonova and Mikhail Ivanov), something sounded like a microbiological experiment. A careful molecular play of timbres, motifs, narrow intervals, as if trampling, touching and shifting each other, as if it did not directly touch Bartok’s music. Without a shadow of stylization, quotations and seams (Voronov says that he uses Bartok’s micro-materials, but they are unrecognizable, you can’t grab by the hand), with shimmering traces of melody, timbre harmony, the score space of the prologue became not a composed musical plot, but an entrance: Bartok’s waiting space, rhyming with the anticipation that is dissolved in Bartók’s own orchestral imagination.

The music of the “Castle” gradually emerged from the “extended overture” as if by itself. Approximately in the same way as the pulsating body of the castle, its soft tissues, circulatory and lymphatic systems appeared through the wall in the video. Safonova’s castle has become a living creature, shackled either by ours or by our own stone ideas of beauty. As a creature-character, the castle is almost more alive than the Duke and Judit: both are internally permeated with the movement of confrontation, attraction-repulsion, fear, hope, weakness, greed, but outwardly almost motionless in the stage opening, more like a solitary cell. The character-castle is almost indistinguishably merged with Bartok’s mute characters – dead wives: although they are always invisibly present somewhere, we, like Judit, have to wait for them, and in the performance they appear almost physically crushingly.

Safonova does not retell the story, but actually realizes it through the language of the body – the body of the castle, the bodies of the singing heroes, the body of the orchestra. Psychoanalysis and mysticism, impressionism and expressionism are wrapped by Bartók and Balažs in a fairy-tale wrapper, beloved by modernity, and lined up in an avant-garde composition – seven secrets in seven rooms behind seven doors. In the performance, all this looks like a breathing physical mass, capriciously taking one form or another. Room-episodes, appearing in the dialogues of the characters and in the part of the orchestra, appear on the video as illusory, unstable outlines of quasi-reality – an old house, a stone tunnel, sky, water. And, barely taking shape, they blur, again becoming the body of the castle.

Much, of course, depends on the performers in how the design of the performance is realized on a particular evening. The Duke is united in two compositions: Harry Agadzhanian works heroically carefully, and if somewhere there is a lack of flexibility, this lack is compensated by the fullness and even unexpected sincerity of a complex musical character. There are two Judit, and they are very different: Natalya Lyaskova plays vulnerability and inflexibility at the same time with vocal transparency; Natalya Buklaga makes her Judit multi-dimensional, dark and voluminous in terms of colors and lines of vocal and stage drawing. An excellent specialist in new music, Fyodor Lednev, leads the orchestra in such a way that all the details of a complex score organism sound geometrically clear, tangible, except that the dynamic relief, which is maximally elevated from beginning to end, may seem monotonous. The performance can go on in one breath (from the inhalation in the prologue to the epilogue-exhalation), it can freeze in static, but, one way or another, the directors seem to hear great how the beauty of Bartók’s music exists and is revealed. And in the gap between the intellectualism of the “post-opera” theatrical solution and the emotional fragility of the score, they allow this beauty to retain its mystery. In the booklet, Safonova offers some references: from “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish” to the “dark vitality” of “Alien-4” by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. But it is obvious that even without them, for all the anti-narrativity, radical associativity of the fabric of the performance, it is intuitively clear and on a good evening can become a rare experience of living a thirst and fear of reality, the more acute the more acute the thirst for escapism becomes in modern reality.