Against the Grain Theatre’s presentation of Theatre of Sound’s production of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle opened last night at the Fleck Dance Theatre. It’s in English translation (by director Daisy Evans) with chamber ensemble and it reimagines the piece as the story of an elderly man caring for a wife who has dementia. What’s extraordinary is that the libretto works extremely smoothly with no changes. The rooms in Bluebeard’s castle are replaced by a trunk with objects that evoke memories from the couple’s long life together. The “torture” of uncertain first love, military service, marriage, children etc. In each scene a silent, younger, Judith (there are three of them representing different ages and life stages) appears until at the end all three are on stage looking at themselves in mirrors. It’s very beautiful and very moving.
Decca have just released a 3CD set of previously unreleased recordings made by the late Jessye Norman between 1989 and 1998 with various orchestras and conductors.
I’ve listened to and liked a lot of Missy Mazzoli’s operatic and vocal music but hadn’t had much exposure to her purely instrumental writing so was interested to get hold of a copy of her new SACD release Dark with Excessive Bright.
Here’s what I know about so far for April.
From the good people of Silicon Valley, who brought us the iPod and the iPad and the iDontknowwhatelse, we now have iSing Silicon Valley; a choir of young women. Their new album is titled love and light and features the choir with, on some tracks, harpist Cheryl Fulton and soprano Estelelí Gomez in settings of Latin texts ranging from Hildegard of Bingen to contemporary composers. It’s all sort of in the range of plainchant to polyphony with young bright vibrato-less voices with maybe a New Agey touch (though that may be guilt by association),
operaramblings 