Béla Bartók Bela Bartok Review

Bartók’s only opera inhabits a rarefied world characterised and confined by dark, brooding passions that tremble on a knife’s edge between epiphanic release and violent ruination. Despite its compact, one-act scale, it offers up an intense, involving, dreamlike experience that stands comparison with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and precious little else in the repertoire.

Valery Gergiev takes to the potent compound of searing psychology, soaring poetry and, in Béla Balázs’ pointed libretto, now stark, now sumptuous symbolism, with characteristic gusto, at pains to stress the pulsing drama at the heart of the seemingly undramatic premise of the work. For once, the Barbican’s love it-or-hate it acoustic comes into its own, focusing the dangerous intensity of the vocal line into white-hot relief and fanning the orchestral accompaniment into fiery outbursts that together scorch the imagination.

Caught live (at the LSO’s Barbican home in January of this year) Willard White’s Bluebeard is a biting, granite-edged performance of inscrutable and intimidating stature. His black marble bass-baritone rumbles with almost sub-sonic threat to assert commanding authority while its no less seductive lyrical sheen adds a sepulchral allure of its own.

A late replacement for an indisposed Katarina Dalayman, the vividly executed flesh-and-blood Judith of Elena Zhidkova stands favourable comparison with Eva Marton on the recent Adam Fischer-conducted Sony recording, Anne Sofie Von Otter on Bernard Haitink’s live Berlin Philharmonic recording for EMI, and, not least for dramatic immediacy, with Christa Ludwig, also accompanied by the LSO, on István Kertész’s still-essential 1965 Decca account.