Bartok: Duke Bluebeard's Castle, Royal Festival Hall

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, composed in 1911 but first performed in 1918, is Béla Bartók’s only opera. It’s also one of his first explicitly modernist works, and the last work he completed before disillusionment with critics led him to abandon music for five years. It is an extraordinary work, part psychological thriller and part symphonic dream-piece. With only two characters and static, minimal staging, it loses nothing when transferred to the concert hall. This performance, in the able hands of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, promises to be something special. 
The libretto, written by Hungarian poet Béla Balász, takes Charles Perrault’s fairy tale and turns it into a dark symbolist narrative. Judith, newly married to Bluebeard, forces him to open a series of seven doors. Through doing so, she penetrates the depth of his psyche, unlocking the secrets that lie within his past and the mystery of his previous three wives. After a spoken prologue, each of the seven pieces represents one of these doors and the revelations contained within.
Bartók’s music, alternatively plaintive and frenzied, creates a fantastic atmosphere of shock, dread and mystique.  The vocals utilise the rhythms of Hungarian folk ballads to mesmerising effect. Soloists Andrea Meláth and Bálint Szabó are both expert interpreters of Bartók, and come respectively from contemporary and more traditional operatic backgrounds. Charles Dutoit, the Royal Philharmonic’s principal conductor, has toured Duke Bluebeard’s Castle around Europe to acclaim.
Two other great Hungarian works accompany the opera. The Rakoczi March, arranged for orchestra by Hector Berlioz, is the country’s unofficial national anthem. Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No.2 inventively transforms its main theme into dozens of distinct variants. The virtuosic pianist Marc-André Hamelin, especially vaunted for his interpretations of Eastern European music, leads.