Bluebeard's Castle

Bartók wrote one opera, and this is it. Judith follows her new husband into his castle and asks him to open its seven doors, one by one. Behind them lies the question the work keeps pressing: how much of another person anyone is entitled to know. Two singers carry the whole hour, and the orchestra speaks for everything they leave unsaid. Sung in Hungarian by an Icelandic cast, in Stephen Higgins's arrangement for a small ensemble, and staged in outline rather than in full.