Peter Eötvös has become one of the most prolific contemporary opera composers. Senza Sangue, introduced to the UK in a concert performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Simone Young, is the Hungarian composer’s 12th opera, and the second to receive its UK premiere in the past year. But this raw one-acter, first performed two years ago, is very different from the slick, black comedy of The Golden Dragon, which Music Theatre Wales staged at the Buxton festival last summer.
With a libretto based on the novel of the same name by Alessandro Baricco, Senza Sangue (Without Blood) was conceived as a prelude to Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Eötvös’s piece also has two protagonists and uses more or less the same large orchestra, makes a few thematic connections and echoes some of its symmetries. A Woman tracks down the Man who, in an unnamed war half a century earlier, had killed her father but spared her life. They relive the murder and flesh out the details of their subsequent lives.
Here the protagonists were mezzo Albane Carrère, detached if perhaps a little too restrained, and the more histrionic baritone Russell Braun. Apart from one extended lyrical monologue for the Woman, much of the vocal writing seems almost expressively neutral, leaving the orchestra to articulate the drama, and have the first and last word. It’s hard to imagine how it would work as the intended upbeat to Bluebeard, and here Young preceded it with less daunting Bartók, the Concerto for Orchestra, played with the same urgency and panache she and the BBCSO then brought to the opera.
