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Love and death go hand in hand in Péter Eötvös's one-act opera Senza sangue. Based on the novel of the same name by Alessandro Baricco, the composer wrote his work as a pair to Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle. In Bartók's piece death is the consequence, but here it precedes events: this is what makes the work suitable for leading into Bartók's weighty mystery play. The open-ended conclusion suggests some kind of release, and likewise, the composer has not sought extreme technical challenges. "In this opera there are no avant-garde endeavours whatsoever. I'd like my work to be performable in fifty years too," said Péter Eötvös of the work.
The story deals with an adult woman who meets the man who, during the Spanish civil war, killed her father in front of her when she was a child. The aim of the confrontation is not revenge, but to seek redemption. "Forgiveness, without blood-letting, not using violence to solve our problems, but overcoming our grievances, with a humane heart: this is extremely important to me," explains Péter Eötvös.
The album is a recording of the premiere in the Müpa Budapest two years ago, directed by Csaba Káel, and played by the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the composer, with Viktória Vizin (the Woman) providing a nuanced mezzosoprano counterfoil to Jordan Shanahan's striking, intelligent baritone (the Man).

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You wouldn't need to know that Peter Eötvös has devised his new one-act opera Senza Sangue (Without Blood) as a companion piece to Bluebeard's Castle to hear the kinship between the two pieces. Like the Bartók masterpiece, the new work is a taut, sinister two-character drama (by a Hungarian composer), played out against a brilliant, foreboding orchestral fabric. Senza Sangue is based on Alessandro Baricco's 2002 novel of the same name, about a woman who witnesses her family's assassination in a civil war and spends her life exacting revenge, executing the murderers one by one. The opera, with libretto by Mari Mezei, dramatizes the final episode of the novel, in which the woman confronts the sole remaining killer: the man who saved her own life while the rest of her family was slaughtered. Unlike Bluebeard, the new work ends in concord rather than annihilation: the woman doesn't kill the man, but instead beckons him on to bed. Senza Sangue's May 8 U.S. premiere, with the New York Philharmonic under its music director Alan Gilbert, revealed a compelling, even fascinating piece of music, but not necessarily a successful opera. The orchestra's forces (nearly identical to Bluebeard's) created sounds whose awesome dimensions suggested the horrors of twentieth-century history itself. The musical argument was by no means uncomplicated, but even at its most dissonant it had a lucidity that carried us urgently, inevitably, from one point to the next. But against this amazing display of compositional and orchestral virtuosity, the singers themselves seemed only secondary. This may have been a product of the particular circumstances of this performance: they were contending not simply with the presence of the mammoth band right on the platform behind them, but also with the acoustic makeup of Avery Fisher Hall, notoriously uncongenial to the human voice. Whatever the case, the work of neither Anne Sofie von Otter nor Russell Braun registered with the kind of impact needed for fully fledged operatic characters. In lightly scored moments, Braun could at least display some his vocal virtues, using his handsome baritone to express the Man's depths of sorrow and regret. But von Otter's voice was too dry throughout to convey much of anything. She couldn't summon the force of declamation to delineate the Woman's angry moments; when the character relates her strange history, von Otter couldn't find the vocal intensity needed to draw us into the narrative. Perhaps in a staged production, with a different cast and the orchestra safely tucked away in the pit, the full worth of the piece will reveal itself. But all too often in the Philharmonic's presentation, Senza Sangue seemed less like an operatic drama than a mammoth tone poem with vocal interjections. The orchestra sounded great, as it did in the reading of the Schubert Unfinished Symphony that opened the program. When the Philharmonic programs standard-rep items before a big new work, the results can sometimes be lackluster, but not on this occasion. The strings glowed; the cellos played the first movement's big tune with bel canto mastery. In the second movement, Gilbert emphasized the 'con moto' in 'Andante con moto'; even if I might prefer a more relaxed reading, he made an interesting case for his brisk tempo, with his players elucidating his interpretive intentions every inch of the way.

     —Fred Cohn , operanews.com

... one's enjoyment of this mesmerising, consuming mini-masterpiece - indeed BMC engineers have done a superb job with the sonics which are vibrant, precise and warm. Inclusion of a synopsis, complete libretto & translations complete a handsome package.

     —Richard Hanlon, musicweb-international.com