Page 103 - FINAL_Theatre of Sound Coverage Book

The production does perhaps uncomfortably allow us to empathise with a
character who remains at the very least a husband of dubious propensities.

But in its exploration of issues of memory and identity, the concept is a

powerful one. Bluebeard’s Castle was prefaced by a work under the title

Judith’s Castle by the composer Electra Perivolaris, working with

dementia sufferers. Her own text, drawing on the Elizabethan poet Edward

Dyer’s verses My Mind to me a Kingdom is, takes the idea of the mind as
a matrix for creativity and reflection as well as memory, suggesting new

ways of looking at dementia. Wisps of melody represented threads of

memories exchanged by the two protagonists, sung admirably by Gweneth

Ann Rand and Matthew Hargreaves.

Drawing long melodic lines with sustained strings, Edward Gardner in the

evening’s performance of the Bartok with the LPO in the Festival Hall

evoked the world of mystery the score has in common with Debussy’s

Pelléas et Mélisande. Particularly memorable were the heart-wrenching

sonorities before the opening of the last door and the sense of cosmic

sadness with which the latter stages are infused, as the tragedy reaches its
inevitable conclusion. A full orchestra, playing and conducted as well as

this, is also able to realise the seductive quality of Bluebeard’s dark

history.