Éry-Bocsárdi-Boros: Sept Portes

The Seven Doors is a performance that offers a dreamlike experience spanning musical styles, inspired by Béla Bartók’s iconic opera Bluebeard’s Castle: in this atmospheric performance the original work’s female hero, Judith, opens seven doors, seven worlds, through which she invites the audience on a meditative journey. The production, which also uses live-camera object theatre, pays tribute both to classical opera and modern electronics; its musical language, ranging from ambient to techno, is built from loops, sound samples and original melodies. The performance premiered in 2024 at the Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier as a collaboration between three Hungarian and one French artist, who will also take part in the Hungarian premiere: Magor Bocsárdi on violin, trumpet and electronic instruments, and Levente Boros on drums and electronic instruments evoke Bartók’s musical world; the director Franciska Éry is responsible for the performance, and Mathieu Cabanes is the lighting designer of the show. 

Franciska Éry is a theatre director living in London. She began her career in the UK at theatres such as the New Diorama, the Lowry, the Bunker Theatre and Hoxton Hall. In recent years she has mainly focused on opera, and is a returning artist at the Royal Opera House and at the Royal Academy of Music. Between 2021 and 2024 she was resident director at the Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier in France; her interactive opera staging SÉISME was nominated for the internationally renowned FEDORA Prize. In 2021 she won an OffWestend Award for the UK premiere of Gounod’s opera The Bloody Nun. Among her works in Hungary, her production of Hamlet at the National Stadium in Debrecen stands out, which received a Highlights of Hungary nomination in 2020, and she also directed the 2023 edition of Textúra at the Hungarian National Gallery. In the 2024 season she directed a world premiere in Sweden of the opera adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s play Die Liebhaberinnen on the stage of Norrlandsoperan. She is a finalist of the 2025 Ring Award in Graz and the European Opera Directing Prize in Geneva. 

Magor Bocsárdi is a Transylvanian-born composer, musician and actor. After graduating from the Art High School in Sfântu Gheorghe, he continued his studies at the music academy in Cluj-Napoca, majoring in violin, and then completed the film directing program at the Sapientia University in Cluj-Napoca. Since 2016 he has mainly been active as a theatre composer, and since then he has written the music for more than fifty productions in Romania and Hungary. He has received awards at several festivals and has been nominated multiple times by the theatre critics’ guild in the category Best Stage Music of the Year. In addition, he is active as a musician and actor; besides his solo project, he is a founding member and frontman of sZempöl Offchestra, one of the defining bands of the Transylvanian underground music scene, with which they have appeared at several major festivals in the region. 

Levente Boros is a drummer and drum teacher living in Budapest. He has been involved with music since childhood: he studied classical piano and sang in choirs, his highly influential teacher being the Kossuth Prize-winning conductor Dénes Szabó. He discovered drumming during his high school years and further honed his studies in this field at the Kőbánya Music Studio. He built a career in popular music, joining the Budapest music community as a member of jazz-oriented bands. He also appears as a musician in theatre pieces and contributes to film music as a composer and studio drummer. His most successful bands are Amoeba and the Fonogram Award-winning group The Qualitons, with the latter performing at Seattle’s KEXP radio as the first and so far only Hungarian act.