One hell of a concert: Opera North’s Bluebeard’s Castle reviewed

Freud knew something about fear. Not the sudden shock of terror, but the creeping, sickening, slow-burn horror of the uncanny. A haunted house might make us jump, but how much more pervasive is that fear when the house is our own home, the monsters our own family, our own self even? It’s when the familiar becomes the unfamiliar, when the telephone call is coming from inside our own psyche, that the chills really build.

Bartok knew this too. ‘Where is the stage — outside or within?’ asks the spoken Prologue to his one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle — the young composer’s take on the classic fairytale of a curious wife, her mysterious new husband and his many locked doors. It’s a piece that was originally judged unstageable — an opera with no action —and though history has overturned that verdict it’s a work that still has its greatest impact in the concert hall where we’re not forced to choose, where the drama plays out both inside and outside simultaneously.

Making his role debut in these two concert performances by the Orchestra of Opera North and conductor Sian Edwards, Christopher Purves is a disquieting Bluebeard. In the run-up to the concerts Opera North reminded us that the English bass-baritone has a long history with villains: Méphistophélès, Scarpia, Nick Shadow, the controlling Protector in George Benjamin’s Written on Skin. Perhaps it was a double-bluff, because what makes Purves’s performance here so uncanny is that he plays Bluebeard as a good guy, a romantic hero manqué.

Dark, warm and woody-soft of tone, coaxing his young bride Judith (Karen Cargill) with fragments of remembered folk melodies, yielding gently to her more unpredictable, chromatic demands, Purves finds unexpected sweetness in Bartok’s score.