Evgeniia Safonova, director-in-residence at BDT (Bolshoi Drama Theatre), who directed there Austerlitz and Disgrace – and Medea at the Lensovet Theatre – is perhaps the most significant breakthrough on the drama stage during the last seasons. The opera by Bartók and Voronov is Evgeniia’s debut in music theatre. However, in Safonova’s work there is no trace of either lack of confidence or overconfidence with which drama directors sometimes traumatize music theatre.

Anna Galayda, RG.ru

In Perm Safonova for the first time entered the realm of music theatre – and her first experience as an opera director and set designer turned out truly impressive. The leit-theme of the production can be formulated as follows: the nonliving emerges as the living. The space of the castle defines not only the topos, but also the central idea of the production. Blood, phlegm, and lymph – the mysterious juices of life – become the most important visual dominants, constantly repeated on the big screen in various forms and modifications.

Gyulara Sadykh-zade, Masters Journal

The orchestra pit has been closed, the first rows of the stalls have been removed, and the members of the orchestra have to take a long walk through the auditorium in order to reach their spots. The huge orchestra has been brought to the forefront – it will probably be the most important part of the talk about our reality. Conductor Fyodor Lednyov does not emphasize the most tormenting things in Bartók’s music; he does not bring fortissimi to boisterous madness, nor does he escalate the darkness. However, as a result of Lednyov’s efforts and thanks to the theatrical suggestiveness of Evgeniia Safonova, who is making her debut in music theatre, we are petrified throughout the entire performance.

Aleksey Parin, Opernwelt

Duke Bluebeard's Castleat Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre is performed with the prologue and epilogue, composed by Valery Voronov specifically for the Perm production. The expanded orchestra introduction by Voronov seems to reassemble the details of the Castle score to create a new structure. The ominous and mysterious sound of this musical preamble triggers suspense, which stays with us until the very end of the performance. Safonova’s directing could be described in a similar way: it is hard to predict where it is going to lead you, opening one room after another, and what kind of knowledge awaits us in the last room.

Tatyana Dzhurova, Flying Critic

The Duke’s castle is the main character of Bartók’s opera. It is even strange why before
Evgeniia Safonova no one had ever come up with such an obvious idea, since both the score and the libretto (written by Bartók’s friend and brother-in-arms Béla Balázs) are literally shouting about that. Hence the importance and length of the orchestra interludes, describing by purely instrumental means every one of the seven closed rooms of the castle; the orchestra is the voice of the Castle, the third participant of the existential drama.

Gyulara Sadykh-zade, Masters Journal

In Safonova’s production the castle became a living creature, constrained either by our or its own stone concepts of beauty. As a creature-character the castle might be even more alive than the Duke and Judith; both of them are internally permeated by the movement of confrontation, attraction-repulsion, fear, hope, weakness, greed, but on the outside they are almost motionless in the stage portal, which looks more like a single sell. The character-castle has been merged with the silent characters of Bartók – the dead wives – almost to the point of indiscernibility: although they are always invisibly present somewhere, we, like Judith, have to wait for them, and in this production they emerge in an almost physically crushing way. Safonova does not retell the story, but practically implements it using the language of the body – the body of the castle, the bodies of the singing characters, the body of the orchestra.

Yulia Bederova, Kommersant

Quite a few things in Safonova’s production are strange and extraordinary, and this strangeness definitely triggers our imagination.

Gyulara Sadykh-zade, Masters Journal

Evgeniia Safonova emphasizes the moment of performance and not the role, as usual. It seems that not even feelings, but substances and intentions are performed.
The female voice, persistent and ecstatic, is cutting – as if with the scalpel – the mutely roaring or subtly vibrating musical space of the castle. The light silhouette pulsates like a filament. Over and over again the mezzo soprano (Natalia Lyaskova – Judith) demands that the next room is opened to her. The basso (Garry Agadzhanyan – Duke Bluebeard), who avoids intoning, sounds almost like an echo without emotional coloring. This echo is sometimes delayed in the space of the Castle. The porous, tightly fit to the face silicone mask covers more than half of the face of the wheelchair ridden man, leaving only his mouth free. This is not a man. Not a villain. Not a monster. This is the Castle itself, its voice, its embodiment. The darkness has no vision – it does not need it.

Tatyana Dzhurova, Flying Critic

Despite the declarative static of the singers, the plasticity of the constrained body is itself eloquent. It is so eloquent that the production could have been perceived as a contemporary dance piece, if not for the vocal impressiveness of the performers.

Anna Galayda, RG.ru

The video content removes the opposition between the external and the internal, macrocosm and microcosm (the general “landscape” plan and macro-plans of pulsating body organs and tissues make up the same hyperspace): the flesh, sprawling with no end in sight, emerges either as a mountain landscape in the very beginning, or, much later, as a panorama of clouds, turning the color of dried blood.

Tatyana Dzhurova, Flying Critic

The rooms-episodes, emerging in the dialogues of the characters and in the orchestral part, are manifested in the video as illusory, unstable outlines of quasi-reality – of the old house, the stone tunnel, the skies, and the water. And, being barely formed, they fade away and again become the body of the castle.

Yulia Bederova, Kommersant

Director Safonova does not offer us some squeaky-clean stage images, but instead creates a large, well-managed space, which transforms the inner content into the visual universe.

Aleksey Parin, Opernwelt

Opening one room of the Castle after another, the direction avoids illustrativeness. We do not see any “wives” on the screen, only a female ghost – Judith’s doppelganger: at first she runs towards us along the tunnel and then dashes away, as if pursued by someone. Or, like in the room of “the lake of tears”, that very girl plunges herself into the silent water column like an embryo.

Tatyana Dzhurova, Flying Critic

The video projection, together with the orchestra, is enthusiastically building the space of the Castle – the main character, according to the title of the opera. In this projection we discern some glimpses of people – a beautiful woman, like in a horror film, is rushing about as if trying “to find herself”, the vast spaces of the universe turn into narrow overhanging passages. Throughout the performance we are mentally drowning in this screen, from time to time acquiring the third dimension. Closer to the end the Bluebeard’s wheelchair appears on the screen – empty, but burning as a living flame. It is hard to understand whether the owner of the Castle is burning or he had already burnt before the beginning of action. Over the empty stage an enormous mobile sculpture hovers in a literal sense: these are pulsating innards of a living creature, with voluminous vessels, thickenings, swellings that take up half of the stage. We hear Valery Voronov’s short epilogue, which sounds as a heavy exhaling after a tormenting cry. And after that, for quite a long time we are trying to guess whether it was that gut that wove all the obscure images of the Castle and made us shake with terror for one and a half hours.

Aleksey Parin, Opernwelt

The final realization of the Castle’s terrifying otherness comes in the epilogue. Its duration is about three minutes, but at the moment of its performance the screen visuality modulates into something tangible: in the depth of the niche-stage we can see a folded leather sack, swollen like the belly of a woman in labor, inside which a strange unearthly life is ripening. Inside the sack, under the skin, permeated with a network of blood vessels, some monstrous tubers-heads raise and fall. The Duke, remaining alone, silently watches these pulsations.

Gyulara Sadykh-zade, Masters Journal

The remarkable new music expert – Fyodor Lednyov – leads the orchestra in such a way that every detail of the complex organism of the score sounds tangibly and clearly in a geometric way; only the dynamic terrain, maximally raised from the beginning to the end, might seem monotonous. The performance may proceed in one breath (from the inhaling in the prologue to the epilogue-exhaling), it may freeze in static, but, one way or another, the production team seems to have a perfect grasp of how exactly the beauty of Bartók’s music exists and reveals itself. It is in the gap between the intellectuality of the “post-opera” production concept and the emotional fragility of the score that this beauty is allowed to retain its mystery.

Yulia Bederova, Kommersant

The core value of the production is that both the singers and the enormous orchestra, seated right in the stalls, as well as the entire production team – all of them together have created a truly wholesome production with an original visual code and an unexpected meaning.

Gyulara Sadykh-zade, Masters Journal

Safonova and Lednyov managed to penetrate deep into Bartók’s music through the very essence of music and not in some roundabout ways. The audience highly appreciated the creative efforts of the two artists: the major new event was greeted with standing ovations and shouts. The analysis of the darkness on stage seemed to imply the overcoming of the darkness of our reality in the near future.

Aleksey Parin, Opernwelt