{"id":246,"date":"2015-01-17T17:58:11","date_gmt":"2015-01-17T21:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/borzovoy.com\/blog\/?page_id=246"},"modified":"2020-05-20T22:28:28","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T02:28:28","slug":"bluebeards-castle-erwartung","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/borzovoy.com\/blog\/bluebeards-castle-erwartung\/","title":{"rendered":"Bluebeard’s Castle & Erwartung"},"content":{"rendered":"
BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE \/ ERWARTUNG<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n
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B\u00e9la Bart\u00f3k \/\u00a0Arnold Schoenberg<\/strong><\/div>\n
MAY 6 TO MAY 23, 2015<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Onstage at the Four Seasons Centre\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 145 Queen St. W., Toronto.
\nPerformance time: APPROX. 2 HRS<\/strong>\u00a0including one\u00a0intermission<\/span><\/span>.
\nSung in Hungarian and German\u00a0with English\u00a0SURTITLES\u2122<\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\n

\n

MYSTERY. MURDER. MADNESS.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A bride unlocks the rooms of her mysterious husband\u2019s castle. A woman, lost in the woods, descends into madness. Robert Lepage\u2019s ground-breaking production established the COC universally as a visionary and compelling company.<\/p>\n

CAST AND CREATIVE TEAMS<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Bluebeard’s Castle<\/em>:<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Bluebeard<\/td>\n<\/td>\nJohn Relyea<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Judith<\/td>\n<\/td>\nEkaterina Gubanova<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Erwartung<\/em>:<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0Woman<\/td>\n<\/td>\nKrisztina Szab\u00f3<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Conductor:<\/td>\n<\/td>\nJohannes Debus<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Director:<\/td>\n<\/td>\nRobert Lepage<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Set and Costume Designer:<\/td>\n<\/td>\nMichael Levine<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Lighting Designer:<\/td>\n<\/td>\nRobert Thomson<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Media Effects Designer<\/td>\n<\/td>\nLaurie-Shawn Borzovoy<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\u00a0REVIEWS OF 1995 PRODUCTION<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Theatre director Robert Lepage has teamed up with production designer Michael Levine, lighting designer Robert Thomson and “media effects designer” Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy to stun audiences with a sensory immersion that brings Schoenberg out of the dissonant wings into the dazzling light of night. As opera intends, Erwartung\/Bluebeard<\/i> focuses all the artifice of the modern stage on its purpose. (It is wonderful that the COC lets such creative people have their heads.)<\/b><\/span>
\nWilliam Thorsell, The Globe and Mail<\/i>, January 21, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The Canadian Opera Company’s award-winning, world-travelling, historic double bill of Bartok and Schoenberg made a triumphant return to Toronto\u2026 in every way richer, deeper, more gripping and masterful than ever before.<\/b><\/span>
\nUrjo Kareda, The Globe and Mail<\/i>, January 13, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Two years and successful visits to New York, Edinburgh and Melbourne later, the most widely celebrated production in the history of the Canadian Opera Company came back home last night to the [Sony Centre], looking and sounding better than ever.<\/b><\/span>
\nWilliam Littler, The Toronto Star<\/i>, January 12, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Greatness, perfection, genius\u2026these are not words an arts columnist should use too often for fear of debasing the coinage. But having had a week to cool down, I still have no hesitation in using them to describe the Canadian Opera Company’s double bill\u2026<\/b><\/span>
\nBronwyn Drainie, The Globe and Mail<\/i>, January 19, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In an ideal world, the COC would have its own house, so that this production could be kept in the active repertoire and revived again and again. But even in our flawed reality, this must not be the last time this marvel is seen here. There is nothing like it anywhere else.<\/b><\/span>
\nUrjo Kareda, The Globe and Mail<\/i>, January 13, 1995<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026a once in a lifetime experience.<\/b><\/span>
\nRichard Ouzounian, CBC Radio<\/i>, January 1995<\/p>\n

This was one of those rare evenings in which opera fully realizes its potential as an art form.<\/b><\/span>
\nPeter Dyson, Opera magazine<\/i>, June 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The staging pummels the senses and creates an upside down world of mad surrealism. The special effects, limbs emerging from walls, bodies defying gravity, are worthy of a film studio.<\/b><\/span>
\nDick Smyth, 680 News<\/i>, January 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026space and perspective are twisted and distorted until the entire audience is looking at this dank and tiny world through eyes of madness.<\/b><\/span>
\nJohn Coulbourn, The Toronto Sun<\/i>, January 13, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Again, Lepage toys with perspective, showing us the “inside” of a room one minute, the “outside” the next. Or he makes the vertical seem horizontal, by placing an actor in a chair bolted to the wall. Again, he shows us why his mastery of stage techniques is coveted the world over, and why his understated elegance with regard to human gesture has made him a favourite of great actors.<\/b><\/span>
\nChristopher Winsor, Eye magazine<\/i>, January 19, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Lepage’s control of stage abracadabra is always linked to emotional and psychological investigation, and wonderfully attuned to Richard Bradshaw’s slithery reading of this supreme score.<\/b><\/span>
\nUrjo Kareda, The Globe and Mail<\/i>, January 13, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Lepage and Levine do not actually show us the horrors behind most of those doors; they invite us to experience them through Judith’s eyes, fuelling our imaginations with Bartok’s potently atmospheric music.<\/b><\/span>
\nWilliam Littler, The Toronto Star<\/i>, January 12, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

An eye-opening brush with operatic genius.<\/b><\/span>
\nBronwyn Drainie, The Globe and Mail<\/i>, January 19, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It ain’t Puccini. But it is rather wonderful and an example of the leading edge work an opera company worthy of the name must do.<\/b><\/span>
\nDick Smyth, 680 News<\/i>, January 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The world beyond, underneath, inside. Isn’t it possible that our definition of greatness in art springs from our intuition that the artist has carried us into hidden and forbidden lands? I’m sure that what I was responding to last week at Bluebeard’s Castle<\/i> and\u00a0Erwartung<\/i>\u2026 I’m sure that it is something immeasurably precious that human beings cannot live without.<\/b><\/span>
\nBronwyn Drainie, The Globe and Mail<\/i>, January 19, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Robert Lepage’s direction can’t help but win opera a new audience and revivify the stodgiest opera queen’s love of the form.<\/b><\/span>
\nBert Archer, Xtra!<\/i>, January 20, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

But nobody has made them as subtle and mesmerizing an evocation of early 20th-century anxieties, the struggle between a desire for light and an instinct for darkness, as Robert Lepage and his collaborators in this production.<\/b><\/span>
\nUrjo Kareda, The Globe and Mail<\/i>, January 13, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This is opera brought up to speed, opera for our time.<\/b><\/span>
\nBert Archer, Xtra!<\/i>, January 20, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Freud looms like a dark guardian angel over both works, and for me – never an opera buff – the psychoanalytic quest seems the perfect subject matter for this art form. Opera made sense to me for the first time last week.<\/b><\/span>
\nBronwyn Drainie, The Globe and Mail<\/i>, January 19, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

These two pieces are visually powerful, presenting images you have seen till now only in nightmares and on drug trips.<\/b><\/span>
\nDick Smyth, 680 News<\/i>, January 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Both operas are stunning in every way, but what is most impressive to me is how they have been designed to allow for the full imaginative participation by the audience. Opera is seen, alternately, as elitist art or as something laughable, but what is going on here is what goes on in any successful artistic endeavour. A world is created – an in this case it is a very dark world with very primal emotions – and because this world is complex enough to engage everyone, an audience goes on a journey, unlocking its own doors, enriching itself in the process.<\/b><\/span>
\nCarole Corbeil, The Toronto Star<\/i>, January 21, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

People living within commuting distance of Front Street who don’t take the opportunity to see one of the performances are missing one of the most exciting artistic creations of this century anywhere in the world.<\/b><\/span>
\nBronwyn Drainie, The Globe and Mail<\/i>, January 19, 1995<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE \/ ERWARTUNG B\u00e9la Bart\u00f3k \/\u00a0Arnold Schoenberg MAY 6 TO MAY 23, 2015 Onstage at the Four Seasons Centre\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 145 Queen St. W., Toronto. Performance time: APPROX. 2 HRS\u00a0including one\u00a0intermission. Sung in Hungarian and German\u00a0with English\u00a0SURTITLES\u2122. MYSTERY. MURDER. MADNESS. A bride unlocks the rooms of her … <\/p>\n

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