Béla BARTÓK (1881-1945)
The Wooden Prince – Complete Ballet (1917) [53:48]
The Miraculous Mandarin – Suite from the Ballet (1924/27) [18:26]
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/Susanna Mälkki
rec. 2017/18, Helsinki Music Centre
BIS BIS-2328 SACD [73:07]
Bartók’s ballet, The Wooden Prince took him over two years to compose – from April 1914 to February 1917 – and was given its triumphant first performance in Budapest in May 1917. The period of its composition was a difficult one for him, not only because of the beginning of the war, but also because he feared conscription, his family had to move house when Romania invaded Hungary, and his wife Marta had suffered from persistent ill-health. He had also tried and failed to establish a liaison with Klara Gombossy, (she was aged 14, Bartók was 35), declaring that he would divorce his wife for her. Furthermore, his musical activities had been concentrated in the collecting of folk songs, which could justifiably be described as the first love of his musical life. He was also working on his second string quartet.
He was attracted to the story of The Wooden Prince because of its dramatic possibilities, but also because it was written by Béla Balász, who had written the libretto for Bartók’s one act opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle a few years earlier.
Bartók continuously developed his musical style, and at this time he was still influenced by both Richard Strauss and Stravinsky (Petrushka 1911, Rite of Spring 1913). The outset of the ballet recalls the opening of Das Rheingold, with a memorable slow horn call developing as the music gains density, leading to an orchestrally complex climax. The princess is given a playful, undulating melody on the clarinet, and the prince is given a rather ponderous one. When the ballet reaches the forest section and water sections, Bartók’s music becomes elaborate, and The Alpine Symphony and Petrushka may be detected as influences, indeed, during the Dance of the Waves he uses alto and tenor saxophones, which Richard Strauss had used in his Sinfonia Domestica (1903). For the puppet, he avails himself of the xylophone, untuned percussion and strings struck with the wood of the bow. The princess’ two dances with the puppet precede the re-emergence of the prince, and this almost forms a central slow movement in the musical structure. When the princess dances seductively, trying to attract the prince, Salome’s Dance occurs to me as a possible parallel, and as the two are united at the end, the opening music of the prelude returns, although the horn call is not repeated exactly.
A heavily scored piece such as this, and also The Miraculous Mandarin, really require a recording that can present the listener with an orchestral ‘cushion’ of sound, whilst also supplying clarity of detail. In the analogue past, this was often achieved by multi-miking the orchestra, giving each section its own microphone(s). The result would then be stitched together by the record producer, to achieve a (convincing) blend. This sometimes led to, say, a violin concerto where an enormous violin could dominate an entire orchestra. Whilst multi-miking is still used, digital editing and mixing techniques have evolved so that near miraculous combinations of clarity and density are achieved, whilst maintaining a balance that does not excessively spotlight individual sections of the orchestra. Naturally, such a complex score also requires an orchestra capable of extreme virtuosity, and the Helsinki Philharmonic provide this to the full under their newly appointed principal conductor. She guides them in a performance of expressive sweep and, where required, tenderness. BIS SACD recording, as is so often the case with this company, is state of the art – I wonder what it must sound like via a 5-channel system? Stunning, I should think, since it is mightily impressive in Super Audio stereo.
As far as Bartók was concerned, The Miraculous Mandarin was a “grotesque pantomime” rather than a ballet, and there could hardly be a greater contrast between the settings of it and The Wooden Prince, with the Mandarin being set in a brothel. Its content was so outrageous, more graphic than anything in Lulu, say, that following its premiere in Cologne in 1926, it was withdrawn following significant protest, and was not staged again until 1945. The music itself was almost completed shortly after that of The Wooden Prince, but stylistically it occupies a much harsher, at times grating sound world, there being no hint of misty impressionism. In 1927, shortly after the single Cologne performance, Bartók published an orchestral suite comprising the first six stages of the work, and that is what we have here.
In the full ‘pantomime’, the action continues with the pimps stepping in to rob the mandarin, but he is immune to successive attempts to smother, stab, shoot and hang him. Only when the girl starts to feel pity for him and embraces him, does he bleed to death in an ecstasy of passion.
This ending has music of even greater orgiastic abandon than we encounter in the suite, but even here the terse ferocity of the music graphically prefigures the eventual outcome. The orchestra respond with considerable virtuosity to Susanna Mälkki’s direction, and the recording copes admirably with Bartok’s glaring, lurid orchestration of the dissonant music. Easy listening, it is not!
Finally, the booklet accompanying the SACD is in English, German and
French, and gives the reader a full breakdown of the action in both
scores, together with a brief musical biography of the conductor.
Jim Westhead
Previous review:
Dan Morgan
