Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung still has the magic: review

By Bela Bartok and Arnold Schoenberg. Directed by Robert Lepage. Until May 23 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, 145 Queen St. W. 416-363-8231.

It can be a risky thing to revisit a major lover from your past.

Will they still have the same power over you? Will you wonder what you ever saw in them? Or, even more disturbingly, will their power over you have grown?

Those are thoughts that passed through my mind as I sat down at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on Wednesday night to witness the revival of Robert Lepage’s double bill of Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung.

Back in 1993, this pair of smartly chosen, boldly executed operas signalled a whole new chapter in the life of the Canadian Opera Company. It marked us as unafraid to be daringly world-class instead of settling for being responsibly Canadian.

Just like the life-changing beloved of your youth, this Lepage evening of magic earned us a stellar reputation around the world and opened the door for the many, many challenging productions we’ve enjoyed in the intervening 22 years.

But how would it hold up? While I was certainly one of those who was blown away by this matched set of existential cries of agony at its original production, the 2001 revival made less of an impression on me.

Was it simply because it was no longer new and fresh and exhilarating? Or had we overpraised it upon its initial appearance, flushed with the myopia that passion often brings?

It was now 14 years later. Time would surely provide the surest test.

But it only took a few minutes on Wednesday’s opening performance for me to realize that, no, we had not been had with the folly of youth in 1993. This double bill of operas by Bela Bartok and Arnold Schoenberg remains a diabolically astute pairing and Lepage’s production has grown in depth and stature over the decades.

Each is a story of obsessive passion intertwined with bloody death. In Bluebeard’s Castle, it takes the form of a satanic fairy tale, while in Erwartung, the frontier between truth and illusion is crossed over repeatedly without the aid of a passport.

There are images that unite the works: the forbidding, slanting wall that Michael Levine uses as the basis of his endlessly malleable setting; the white-garbed woman at the centre of each piece, tottering on the edge of insanity; and the ever-changing, richly evocative lighting of Robert Thomson that gives us everything we need, from a torrent of gore to the benediction of a sunrise, while the media effects design of Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy adds constantly arresting images to play with our subconscious.

And with these brilliant design elements, Lepage stages with a classical rigour and simplicity that keeps raising the tension ever higher.

In Bluebeard’s Castle, the latest bride of the ominous seducer wants to see what is behind all seven of the doors in his castle. Ekaterina Gubanova is heart-rending as she keeps rushing headlong towards a final destiny whose horror we sense long before she does.

And John Relyea has never seemed more satanically in command than he is here as Bluebeard, his rich full tones rolling like the drums of damnation, while he follows a path he regrets but never swerves from.

Conductor Johannes Debus conducts Bartok’s wildly emotional score like a man who has “supp’d full with horrors” (to quote Macbeth) and yet still has room for more. The COC Orchestra obliged him with waves of sheer sound that were gut-wrenching in their power.

After intermission, the playing field is different, yet somehow the same. Schoenberg’s music jerks wildly around, like the EKG of someone on the verge of a major cardiac episode and this is indeed the best way to describe The Woman, sung by Krisztina Szabo with an emotional abandon that manages to be thrilling and horrifying at the same time.

Levine’s wall seems less forbidding here while Thomson’s lighting and Borzovoy’s effects take us into free-associating images that our troubled heroine keeps imagining (or seeing).

The three superbly controlled actors (Jordan Gasparik, Noam Markus and Mark Johnson) who play the Brides in the first piece appear here as a mistress, a lover and a psychiatrist respectively and bring each to vivid, ever-changing life.

In the end, one feels emotionally drained yet somehow cleansed by the duality of the two operas. Lepage, Debus, Levine, Thomson and Borzovoy have taken us deep inside the music of two very different geniuses and found a way to unite them into an evening of troubling, powerful spectacle.

Yes, some love affairs are meant to be revisited. This is one of them.