Bartok - Bluebeard's Castle

This has always been one my favourite Bartok pieces and it's surely destined to remain that way. It's a hypnotic piece that derives its quite unique atmosphere from a very distinctive and typically Bartokian set of features. Many of Bartok's later works have a lapidary quality, a deceptive plainness that for an uninitiated listener easily masks the intricacy of their construction. Despite the lushness of the symphonic tapestry that pervades Bluebeard, that lapidary quality is very much in evidence in this early work too. One act, one hour of music, one (metaphorical) place, two protagonists which carry the proceedings in equal measure. The work starts in medias res and ends equally abruptly. The plot revolves around a single issue - negotiating the tension between inside and outside, between sun and moon, light and darkness, male and female - which is taken up in 7 variations. This basic tension is reflected in the piece's musical architecture, where a wealth of musical material is stitched together by a single, persistent 'blood' leitmotiv (a minor second). Bluebeard's short declamatory sentences and the evident fact that the whole piece is actually an uninterrupted hour-long Lento contrast with the glittering sophistication of the orchestration, the richness of the lyricism and the sinuousness of the instrumental voices (the strings and clarinet in particular). Finally, the work is strictly tonal, stretched as an arc between the F# passages at the beginning and ending of the work and a C major scene (tonally the greatest possible distance from F#) placed in the centre of the work. As a listener we sense the clever simplicity of this architecture in the hypnotic power of the music. It is almost beyond belief that Bartok composed this so very rewarding work at such an early stage of his career, at a point where he had no experience at all, beyond folk song arrangements, in writing for voices.

I have only a single version of this work in my collection with which I am perfectly happy: a 1979 DGG recording with Wolfgang Sawallisch at the helm of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, with an impressive Julia Varady and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the key roles. Meanwhile it has disappeared from the catalogue.