Death and lunacy prevailed at the Jones Hall for the Performing Arts when the Houston Symphony took on tales of a Mad Tea Party, a hypochondriac prince’s quest for a bride born of citrus, the death of a young fisher’s apprentice and a duke with a chamber filled with of dead spouses. The concert, conducted by the Slovakian-born Juraj Valčuha in his third season as the Houston Symphony’s Music Director, also demonstrated what a tight organization the orchestra is.
The concert opened with Unsuk Chin’s three-minute Prelude to the Mad Tea Party from her 2007 opera Alice in Wonderland, which was about as good a place to start as any. The brisk piece is like a fast fox hunt, quick piano arpeggios and mallet percussion, thunderous timpani and a hard stop. It introduced the orchestra’s enormity and clarity while ramping to Prokofiev’s orchestral suite from his 1921 comedic opera The Love for Three Oranges, based on an Italian folk tale. It followed Chin in pep and bounce, the orchestra filling the stage and negotiating fast changes with alacrity. Their precision allowed parts of the stage to fall silent even as new motifs arose elsewhere; the spatiality was stunning. When they fell together, it was with exalting resonance. The brief and famed March was light when desired, massive when demanded, and concluded like snapped elastic.
After an excerpted Alice in Wonderland and a Love for Three Oranges in digest form, the HSO broke stride – in another truncation – with the placid Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s 1945 opera Peter Grimes. The interludes felt like songs (if wordless), not for fishers so much as for the water itself. Like the ebb and flow of the tide, the musical momentum was cyclical without quite repeating, steady in its coming and going until the riptide of the final Storm.
The move from Prokofiev to Britten felt less natural than from Britten to Bartók’s sole opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, even if the interval separated them. The theatre grew dark and bass-baritone Gábor Bretz (hailing, like the composer, from Hungary) only entered in white tie and long tails once the orchestra had begun. Russian mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova as Judith was heard from offstage, calling after Bretz’s Bluebeard before entering in a resplendent (if ominous) bright red gown. Gubanova and Bretz were a match made in heaven, even if Judith and the Duke very much were not. They’re both warm and throaty, articulate singers, wonderful together for what little time they had.
Where the remarkable rigor of the orchestra had been well on display in the first half, here it was an understated asset, a spine for the singers and the nightmarish tale. The stage cast in blue and green and red and purple as the action moved from chamber to chamber in the castle, making even the music seem Technicolor, underscoring the solo drama.
Bartók’s tale – the only one actually told, or sung, in the concert – is entirely procedural. There’s little reason to count down the rooms except to allow the drama to build, and Valčuha worked the delicacy of the flowers and the vastness of the kingdom, and of course the awaiting horror, for all they were worth. By extension, there’s not much reason for the opera itself to exist except for Bartók’s prowess at building tension, which he does in a riveting, hour-long, unbroken line. The HSO again was adept at silence: partial silence, momentary silence, dramatic silence. The powerful voices of Bretz and Gubanova, and the doom of Bartók, filled the space.
