Davies Augmented with Innovative Lighting

Gustave Doré’s woodcut of Bluebeard and his wife (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Last night Lighting Designer Luke Kritzeck seemed to be in charge at Davies Symphony Hall, even if Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen was on the podium leading the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). He conceived an elaborate structure that hovered above the stage and provided a diversity of impressive visual settings for the two works on the program, “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire” by Alexander Scriabin in the first half, followed by Béla Bartók’s one-act opera “Bluebeard’s Castle” in the second. In my own humble opinion, it was the second half that stole the show.

Mind you, I take pride in having a “track record” of past staged presentations of Bartók’s opera. My first encounter was in my student days (1967 to be specific), when the Opera Company of Boston coupled it with that composers pantomime ballet (also in one act), “The Miraculous Mandarin.” Decades later, I would enjoy watching and listening to Jessye Norman, when she sang the role of Judith at the Metropolitan Opera. Last night’s Judith was Michelle DeYoung (performing the role for the second time with SFS), joined by bass-baritone Gerald Finley in the title role. Breezy Leigh delivered the spoken “Prologue of the Bard.” (Unless I am mistaken, this was the first time I encountered a performance that included that prologue.)

Staging was limited in all three of the productions I have encountered. For the most part, the “action” is a dialogue between the two characters. Judith is Bluebeard’s latest wife. The “action” involves opening seven doors in the castle, the last of which reveals Bluebeard’s previous wives. In all of the productions that I have experienced, one never sees what is behind the doors (or, for that matter, the doors themselves), informed only by the verbal exchanges between the two characters. However, each of those doors is defined in terms of its own symbolic color; and that was where Kritzeck could take charge of things, establishing the “tone” of each of those colors to suit both the text and the music.

This was most evident in the “gleaming torrent” of white light when the fifth door is opened. Prior to that door, the lighting was as subdued as the disquietingly soft rhetoric of the orchestra. With the fifth door comes the shock of the loudest dynamics in the entire opera, reinforced by offstage brass; and “blazing” is the only way to describe the intensity of the light itself. This was the “magic moment” in which Kritzeck’s design was perfectly aligned with Salonen’s impeccable command of his full resources.

Sadly, that alignment was never really established during the first half of the program. Light had to contend with scent provided by perfumer Mathilde Laurent (although I have to confess that I never was able to follow the “Olfactory Score” provided in a booklet to supplement the program book and may not really have recognized any contributing scent during last night’s performance). Then, of course, there was the extremely rich instrumentation including the solo piano performed by Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the full SFS Chorus prepared by Director Jenny Wong.

Unfortunately, this amounted to much ado about not very much. The fact is that Scriabin was at his best when working with short durations (somewhat in the spirit of Frédéric Chopin). HIs later piano sonatas took on extended lengths. These tended to be exploratory, but they often fumbled around excessive repetition. “Prometheus” may have been conceived as one of the earliest “multimedia experiences;” but there was not much to follow as the music itself unfolded. One could not even appreciate any particular assets in Thibaudet’s contributions as a virtuoso soloist.

Fortunately, the many virtues of the Bartók production left most of us leaving Davies with the satisfaction of a stimulating experience (even if it meant going back into the rain)!