Page 132 - FINAL_Theatre of Sound Coverage Book

Letters to Glikman and the critic’s book on Shostakovich, Story of a Friendship, are just
some of the sources used by the Carducci’s cellist, Emma Denton, to devise this
brilliantly constructed programme. We hear absurd yet menacing official
pronouncements on what was considered to be “healthy” Soviet music, alongside a
moving description of the premiere of the Fourth Quartet, where a violinist describes
Shostakovich’s haggard face, the product he believed, of living “permanently in the
expectation of violent death”.

Yet this journey through selected movements from relevant quartets isn’t always
gloomy. Much vodka is taken, laughter ensues; musicians talk of feeling like “fearless
unmaskers of hypocrisy”. There is even a funny story about the great cellist Mstislav
Rostropovich hitching a ride on a motorbike and arriving “looking like a chimney
sweep”. Throughout, the Carducci Quartet play with total commitment, forcing you to
think afresh about the music and its context. I’m told several festivals around the UK
are considering whether to stage this profound event next year. They shouldn’t hesitate.

Bluebeard’s Castle is another chillingly cold, darkly menacing
place. Bloodstained horrors lurk here, but as the spoken
prologue to Béla Bartók’s one-act opera asks, is the grim tale
unfolding before our eyes or behind them? His Bluebeard hides
his secrets behind locked doors; we hide ours away in our
heads. Is there really any difference?

A rare opportunity to explore these questions came about last
weekend when it was possible to hear two interpretations of
Bartók’s masterpiece in one day, each outstanding, each dramatically different – first at
the intimate Stone Nest, right in the heart of London’s theatreland (a Welsh chapel that
once housed the colourful Limelight club), and later in the wide open spaces of the
Royal Festival Hall, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Staged with alternating casts, the new company Theatre of Sound took the Bluebeard
story of a doomed marriage and used it to explore a pressing contemporary theme:
dementia. In director Daisy Evans’s new translation, bass-baritone Gerald Finley’s
Bluebeard was no distant, brooding tyrant but a caring, if bewildered husband,
welcoming his wife, Judith (Susan Bullock), back to a suburban home she does not
recognise, while also attempting to shield her from his secrets. Those fearsome doors
were replaced by a single suitcase, repository of a lifetime of memories, each one more
difficult for Judith to grasp.

As each memento was revealed, actors spilled on to the stage, portraying Judith in her
past life as lover, wife and mother and possibly also as Bluebeard’s three former wives,
an ambiguity cleverly handled, helping us share in Judith’s bafflement. In such a tiny
venue, with the audience just feet away, every glance, every nuance, was on display.
Finley and Bullock were superb, both in glorious voice, both utterly convincing as their
marriage dissolved into the darkness of dementia. Conductor Stephen Higgins had
reduced Bartók’s massive orchestral score to just eight parts, played by members of the
London Sinfonietta. Inevitably, some of the brilliant colours of the original were lost in
the process, but Bartók’s spirit and intent were still firmly in place.