Welsh National Opera turns 80 this year, and to mark the occasion they've programmed two works about men who destroy everyone who loves them. The season-opener pairs Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle with Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex — serial femicide and incestuous patricide, back to back. Any organization confident enough to open its anniversary season this way deserves attention. The Bartók, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins in a production first seen at English National Opera in 2024, strips the fairy-tale scaffolding almost completely. The seven locked doors of Bluebeard's castle — in Béla Balázs's libretto already more metaphor than masonry — become here fully interior, represented across a single long dining table by LJ Parkinson's Bard figure, distributing cutlery for weaponry, scattering gold, offering flowers. The objects track the score's emotional temperature precisely. The genius of this approach is that it stops the production from becoming a spectacle about the rooms and keeps it exactly where Bartók wanted it: inside the psyche. Christine Rice's Judith and Nathan Berg's Bluebeard generate genuine intimacy — which is crucial, because the horror only works if you believe the relationship. Berg's implacability never tips into caricature; Rice's curiosity reads as compulsion, not foolishness. The WNO chorus, all women, opens the evening intoning Hildegard von Bingen — O Rubor Sanguinis and Rex Noster Promptus Est, both soaked in martyrdom imagery — and returns as the previous wives, fourteen of them, when the final door opens. In a departure from convention, Judith does not join them: she stays, condemned to a living hell. Bluebeard's final word, 'darkness,' lands on a tritone, the diabolus in musica. No redemption offered. Hill-Gibbins's Oedipus Rex is new work and scales up dramatically — the full width of the Wales Millennium Centre stage, a 35-strong male chorus embodying Theban mass pressure, everything in stark black except a vast illuminated half-globe and the deliberate visual exceptions: Rice's luminous Jocasta, Peter Hoare's blood-red suit. The Latin text of Cocteau/Stravinsky's own design gives the piece its monumental rigidity, and Hoare delivers exactly the right arc: a king's conviction so total that the truth dissolves against it, then the slow collapse. The blinding, self-inflicted, arrives as inevitability rather than shock. That's harder to achieve than it sounds. The production isn't without friction. Some of Parkinson's narration failed to carry in the hall. The choreographic choices — considerable running, crawling — occasionally overdrive the ritualism Stravinsky built into the score. But conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya held both works in command: Bartók's chromatic eloquence fully articulated, and a real sense of playfulness alongside the solemnity in the Stravinsky, which is easy to conduct into marble. Taken together, the pairing works as more than programming convenience. Both works are about the impossibility of knowledge saving you: Judith opens the doors and it destroys her; Oedipus uncovers the truth and it blinds him. The Hildegard preface, the Bingen blood-of-martyrs texts, position the whole evening in a tradition of sacred horror that makes the grimness feel earned rather than indulgent. WNO has found a serious curatorial argument, not just a provocative bill.
