James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra are ringing in the new year this week not with a frothy champagne-like program but with one of the darkest, most severe — yet also most enticing — pairings of the season: Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex’’ and Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle.’’
Levine has conducted each work often over the course of his career, but never before on the same program. Judging by last night’s performance, pairing these pieces worked on many levels, if not on all of them.
Both are modern operatic masterpieces with tragic subjects, yet they have entirely contrasting musical temperatures.
Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex’’ draws its cool potency in part from its detachment, the sense of distance it inserts between the events of the tragedy and their musical expression. That the libretto is in Latin only adds to the distancing.
In “Bluebeard’s Castle,’’ by contrast, music and text are completely interpenetrated, and the score is full of fantastically vivid orchestral writing that tracks the unfolding drama with an eerie precision.
Hearing the two in such close proximity placed their contrasts in fascinating, sharp relief, but I am not sure the operatic density of this program ended up flattering either work.
The demands placed on the orchestra and on two principal singers who were cast in both operas — Michelle DeYoung and Albert Dohmen — made stamina paramount. You could feel musicians pacing themselves, and neither work received a truly knockout performance.
That said, it was a night with many individual rewards. In the Stravinsky, Levine drew strong, clear, well-shaped singing from the men of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Russell Thomas was an appealing if not quite a formidable Oedipus, his tenor a mix of ardency and sweetness.
DeYoung and Dohmen were both more persuasive in the Bartok, where her performance distilled the work’s emotional extremes and his singing had a somber resonance.
Levine and the orchestra captured many of the score’s wonderful details, the ripples on the lake of tears, the spots of blood on the Duke’s treasures.
The unlocking of Bluebeard’s Fifth Door, which opens onto his majestic kingdom, came off last night as the tremendous climax Bartok intended, with the BSO brass blazing, the Symphony Hall organ ringing out, and DeYoung unleashing an ecstatic high C.
To open “Bluebeard,’’ Ors Kisfaludy rendered the spoken Hungarian prologue with a striking theatrical delivery, Bartok’s dark horror-tale evolving seamlessly from speech into song.
Frank Langella was the narrator in the Stravinsky.
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