Hallucination, live burial, matricide: Seattle Opera 08-09

It's been a while since I actually, literally gasped upon reading a Seattle Opera season announcement, but their decision to present a Bartok/Schoenberg double bill that stunned me a decade ago makes the upcoming season the most thrilling in some time. The lineup includes two standard-rep operas, three "modern" works--all of which predate World War I--and one almost-standard-rep bonbon.

Verdi's Aida runs Aug. 2-23, with Andrea Gruber (who's sung Lady Macbeth and Minnie here) in the title role and powerhouse mezzo Stephanie Blythe (our Carmen and Fricka) as her nemesis Amneris. Soprano Janice Baird sings Strauss' Elektra Oct. 18-Nov. 1; check her out before she takes on Brunnhilde in the summer '09 Ring.

Gerard Schwarz conducts Bizet's The Pearl Fishers (Jan. 10-24), best known for the luscious tenor-baritone duet "Au fond du temple saint," probably opera's greatest m4m love song (the text, in brief: "We used to be best friends--but then we let a woman come between us! We'll never let that happen again!", though of course they do.) And to close the season, Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro (May 2-16), in an expansion of Peter Kazaras' sensitive, warmhearted production for the Young Artists Program in 2005 (review here). As the Count: Mariusz Kwiecien, who scored a year ago as Mozart's other womanizer-with-a-dark-side, Don Giovanni.

Most exciting--unbelievable, in fact--is their presentation of Robert Lepage's production of Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle and Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung (Feb. 21-March 7), which I saw in Vancouver in 1998 and never dreamed would be done here. I did, however, hang on to the review I wrote:

"Bartok