BBC SSO & Elim Chan, Glasgow review: 'deeply felt, expertly paced'
The players of the BBC SSO were on vivid form for this performance of Bartók’s brooding opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, writes David Kettle
A bright and sunny spring afternoon was hardly the most appropriate setting for one of the repertoire’s blackest, most claustrophobic operas. The staff at the City Halls seemed to agree, pulling down blinds to block the Glasgow sunshine before the BBC SSO’s strong performance of Bartók’s brooding Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. It was a wise move: visiting conductor Elim Chan’s sonorous, dense account made great play of the score’s sepulchral gloom and its occasional moments of blinding light, even if her broad, sweeping gestures sometimes meant the ensemble wasn’t quite as crisp as it might have been.
Nevertheless, it was a deeply felt, expertly paced performance, and one that pulled off a dramatic masterstroke in assigning the opera’s spoken introduction to new bride Judith, uttered with appropriate foreboding by mezzo Dorottya Láng. It launched the opera from very much a female perspective, so that her later determination to understand her mysterious husband’s past felt all the more necessary.
Láng was a wonderfully sensual Judith, entirely aware of what she was asking yet no less horrified by her discoveries. Gábor Bretz as her shadowy betrothed developed convincingly from implacable near-silence to passion, even warmth. The BBC SSO players were on particularly vivid form, even if Chan seemed to bypass a few opportunities for dramatic effect. The horror-struck silence following Bartók’s hollow closing sounds was the longest I’ve experienced in years – clearly that atmospheric blind-closing had made its contribution to the genuinely unsettling atmosphere of doom and darkness.
The Britten Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes that launched the concert were sincerely felt, but more passages of ragged ensemble left Chan’s account struggling to convince. She had a fine old time, however, amid the bracing sonorities of Shostakovich’s Hamlet Suite – even if the programme directed us towards the composer’s 1932 theatrical music, when it was his (entirely different) 1964 film suite that was played. No wonder there was confusion about when and whether to clap.
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