The Bangalow Music Festival is a jewel in the classical-musical life of the Northern Rivers. Long may it continue.

Musically this performance was an unmitigated delight. But in my opinion the same could not be said of the staging. Lindy Hume is one of Australia’s most well-known, versatile, and lively directors, but even she couldn’t coax drama out of this work.

Alice Oswald describes her text as “a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story”. I immediately asked myself, does atmosphere need a translation?

This is not only a beautiful venue with a huge picture window behind the performance area, but possibly the best acoustic in Australia for listening to chamber music for strings.

I wasn’t going to start this review by talking about the music, because it was not the only thing about this show that was magic, but I will take my cue from the audience.

What an experience! It’s physicality was a matter of bodily sensation. If this was the vibe of the Festival, it will certainly go with a bang!

Michael Tippet famously said that to set a text you must first “break the back of the poetry”. I have never seen this done more effectively than in this opera.

The subtitle of this concert is: From the Ancient to the New World. This expresses in concise form one of the major projects of the great viol-player and doyen of early music, the Catalonian Jordi Savall.

It is difficult to overstate the magnificence of the opera itself. Faster-moving than Mozart, more true to prevalent theories of drama than Wagner, and without later imitations in almost any respect, it is one of the truly great combinations of music and theatre.

Bartok’s one-act opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, is a post-Freudian re-working of Charles Perrault’s Barbe Bleu (1697) in which the doors in the castle become the doors into Bartok’s heart.