SEATTLE — Opera companies rely on the play-it-safe approach of presenting audience-pleasers from the past. Mozart, Verdi and Puccini are well loved and they sell tickets, but there are fans who want to see more contemporary works to broaden their musical horizon.
Seattle Opera takes up the challenge with modern works that are a century old, a double bill of one-act operas that opened Saturday night. “Bluebeard’s Castle,” composed in 1911 by Bela Bartok, and “Ewartung,” composed in 1909 by Arnold Schoenberg, demonstrate that what’s old is new in this acclaimed production.
The operas by two masters of the modern era offer an evening of dynamic theater that pushes the boundaries with absorbing drama and music that’s beautiful and complex (Bartok) but also confounding to ears (Schoenberg) attuned to the lyricism of, say, Italian opera.
This production plays in Seattle through March 7, headed by a cast of first-rate artists who breathe fire and ice into the spine-tingling stories, under the seasoned stage direction of Francois Racine, a veteran of this production in opera houses around the world.
The two operas are linked by the mood and culture of the time in which they were written: the decline and passing of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the cusp of World War I and the birth of a new age with many crosscurrents, including Expressionist art and the revolutionary thinking of Sigmund Freud.
In “Bluebeard,” Judith (sung by Polish mezzo soprano Malgorzata Walewska) goes against warnings and marries Duke Bluebeard (bass-baritone John Relyea). On her wedding day she enters his castle for the first time. A dark, forbidding passage of stone walls hides seven locked doors. Judith demands each door be opened.
The rooms behind these doors hide sinister secrets: a torture chamber, a room full of weapons, a chamber of jewels. Judith’s hysteria mounts as she sees that each room is covered in blood.
The final room reveals Bluebeard’s three former wives, walking zombies dressed in blood red.
Relyea, one of the great bass-baritones of our time, and Walewska, in her company debut, offered masterful, vocally commanding performances and full-throttle-acting on opening night.
Schoenberg’s “Ewartung” is a half-hour monologue in which a woman runs amok in a madhouse of the mind.
Soprano Susan Marie Pierson is mesmerizing as the unhinged woman in a nighttime forest in a desperate search for her lover.
She’s accompanied by a nonsinging cast — The Lover, The Mistress (who has lured the lover away) and The Psychiatrist — and by Schoenberg’s ever-changing score.
These are operas you won’t soon forget.
At the opera
“Bluebeard’s Castle,” by Bela Bartok; “Ewartung,” by Arnold Schoenberg: Seattle Opera production through March 7, McCaw Hall, Seattle Center. “Bluebeard” sung in Hungarian, “Ewartung” in German, with English captions. Approximate running time two hours, including one intermission. Tickets, 206-389-7676, 800-426-1619, www.seattleopera.org.
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