Bartok - The Wooden Prince

We move on with Bartok's stage works. Kodaly thought that Bluebeard and the Prince ought to be played back-to-back to experience their full impact:

... the constructive energy of the music (of Duke Bluebeard's Castle) becomes even more evident if we hear the Wooden Prince immediately afterwards. The playful, mobile Allegro of the ballet serves to balance the desolate Adagio of the opera. The two works fit together like two movements of a huge symphony.

I really don't buy that assessment. Bluebeard is powerful enough to stand on its own as a quiet, mysterious monolith. And although the Prince's Prelude starts in the same C major that suffuses the central episode in Bluebeard, I find these works to project a very different musical ambience. In contrast to the opera's magnificent coherence of plot, atmosphere and musical structure, the Wooden Prince has always struck me as somewhat shapeless. Today's audition seemed to confirm that impression. It's in a way a more conventional piece grafted on a meandering, fairy tale-like narrative. One is reminded of the great Tchaikovsky ballets and, of course, Stravinsky's Firebird and Petrouchka. I suppose that the music of the complete ballet is to a certain extent tied to the stage action, which is why certain episodes come across as rhapsodic.

That being said, there is no doubt that this is a great score, impregnated with a deep, almost Tristan-like yearning. Another way of looking at the piece, rather than as a balletic sequence of tableaux, is as a giant symphonic poem elaborated as a set of variations on a single theme. Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande or, better still, Liszt's Faust Symphony come to mind. The Verzerrungstechnique that Liszt deploys in the latter maybe comes close to the way Bartok projects his material into the grotesque and even demonic.

One reason why the Prince fails to make a bigger impact on me is the recording. I have been listening to Boulez' digital rendering on CD, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It won two Grammy Awards (one for best orchestral recording in 1993 and one for best orchestral performance in 1994) and was enthusiastically praised by Gramophone critics as well. The technical quality of the recording has been universally applauded. I honestly can't fully endorse that enthusiasm. Interpretation-wise there is indeed a lot to be admired. But I find the digital sound to be rather airless, with an annoying kind of sheen enveloping the instrumental voices, somewhat veiling inner detail. Tuttis are sounding compact and slightly saturated too. And although the music often sounds very loud, the recording does not strike me as terribly dynamic. In short, it is a typical run-of-the-mill, early 1990s digital product. Compared to what some labels produce today (ECM, Harmonia Mundi) it sounds positively bland. And let's not mention what the RCA engineers accomplished in Orchestra Hall at Fritz Reiner's time.

So I'm definitely interested to look a little further afield to find a more engaging alternative to the Boulez recording.