Rusalka, Opéra national de Paris, 29 January 2019

Opéra Bastille

Prince (Klaus Florian Vogt), Foreign Princess (Karita Mattila), Rusalka (Camilla Nylund)
Images: Guergana Damianova /Opéra national de Paris

Prince – Klaus Florian Vogt

Foreign Princess – Karita Mattila

Rusalka – Camilla Nylund

Vodník – Thomas Johannes Mayer

Ježibaba – Michelle DeYoung

Huntsman’s Voice – Danylo Matviienko

Kitchen Boy – Jeanne Ireland

Nymphs – Andreea Soare, Emanuela Pascu, Élodie Méchain

Gamekeeper – Tomasz Kumiega

Robert Carsen (director, lighting)

Michael Levine (designs)

Peter van Praet (lighting)

Philippe Giraudeau (choreography)

Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Alessandro di Stefano)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris

Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

And so, the third and final opera from my long weekend in Paris: Dvořák’s Rusalka. Whilst the first two, Il primo omicidio (an oratorio, albeit staged) and Les Troyens, garnered their principal interest from their respective productions and, in the latter case, singing too, Rusalka, once over a problematical first act, offered largely musical riches and little enlightenment from the director. To be fair, Robert Carsen’s production is old, dating from 2002. Age, however, does not really seem to be the problem. It does not look tired; indeed, it looks ‘stylish’, ‘beautiful’, etc., fresh too, so that it might have been premiered today; it just does not seem to have anything particular to say.

Rusalka

It is not exactly ‘traditional’, although it is difficult to imagine ‘traditionalists’ minding it, their ideology and practice often proving not quite so consonant as they imagine. Indeed, so long as ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful’ designs are present, they are unlikely to notice a Konzept one way or another. Credit where credit is due: Michael Levine’s designs and the lighting from Praet and Carsen himself are splendidly realised. If you like large, ultra-minimalist hotel bedrooms, furnished in exquisite silk and satin – or fabric that resembles them from afar – you may be happy. (I should happily stay in one, but that is a different matter.) There is a coup de theatre, a literally blinding flash of fire, at the moment of fateful transformation; it promises a great deal, yet alas, that is that. What instead we have is an oh-so-elegant paddling pool as the setting for the first act; in the second, the bed that has been suspended in the air find itself in that hotel room, reflected in a mirror image. Ježibaba install herself in that bed, newly suspended in mid-air for the third, with the return of water perhaps – if we are to be charitable – also suggesting a visual dissolution of themes; that scene is followed by a return to the hotel room, after which presumably the Prince and Rusalka will die – or perhaps not. Is that a directorial twist, a feminist criticism? Perhaps, although it does not seem to be presented as such. It seems more a matter of simply not listening to either words or music, without actively attempting to criticise them.  


There are likewise mild, ‘stylish’ confusions in the second act. What to make of that mirror image (until someone neglected to replicate a gesture, presumably by accident rather than on purpose)? I assume it was intended as a play on the bifurcation of human and spirit world, yet the placing of different characters, the Foreign Princess and Rusalka dressed identically, seems merely arbitrary in that respect. Is the lack of sense the point? It could be might be; again it does not seem to be. Much of this could readily contribute to something more interesting; it is a genuine pity that it does not, remaining more at the level of opera as a ‘luxury product’ that barely registers as drama. If, for instance, at ENO, you favoured Carsen’s similarly ‘beautiful’ Midsummmer Night’s Dream, with a not dissimilar bed centre-stage, to Christopher Alden’s gripping piece of theatre with the same work, this will certainly be for you. By contrast, Barrie Kosky’s brilliant production for Berlin’s Komische Oper truly penetrates to the dramatic heart, in more than one way, of the work.

Nymphs (Andreea Soare, Emanuela Pascu, Élodie Méchain), Rusalka

As a framework for fine musical and indeed stage performances, the production nevertheless worked well. Susanna Mälkki started fitfully, rendering the first act somewhat puzzling. However, in the second and third acts, she came increasingly into her own, drawing a variety of tone and phrasing, not to mention formal dynamism, seemingly unimagined by Philippe Jordan the previous night in Les Troyens. For her, the third act was undoubtedly the climax, motivic development truly working itself out horizontally and vertically in ways that Brahms and Schoenberg would surely have admired.

Foreign Princess and Prince

Mälkki’s two compatriots onstage proved outstanding throughout, Camilla Nylund offering an unfailingly differentiated performance equally attentive to the needs of words and music. Nothing was taken for granted; everything sounded – and looked – fresh. Karita Mattila announced undefinable, unmistakeable star quality as soon as she strode on stage as the Foreign Princess. One was left in little doubt whose musical wiles would win out, at least in the here and now. It was interesting to hear voices one ‘knew’ from Wagner, moreover, in this music, not at all inappropriately. Michelle DeYoung proved a formidable Ježibaba in every way. Thomas Johannes Mayer and Klaus Florian Vogt are known quantities. The former impressed once again, rather as a Wanderer on location; whether one ‘likes’ the latter is largely a matter of taste, though I shall admit to feeling that that once ethereal – if highly controversial – Lohengrin voice wears somewhat thin nowadays. All other parts were taken with great musical and dramatic skill, the three nymphs, Andreea Soare, Emanuela Pascu, Élodie Méchain, worthy of especial mention.

Philharmonia/Salonen - Schoenberg, Gurrelieder, 28 June 2018

Royal Festival Hall

Gurrelieder

Waldemar – Robert Dean Smith

Tove – Camilla Tilling

Wood-dove – Michelle DeYoung

Peasant – David Soar

Klaus-Narr – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke

Speaker – Barbara Sukowa

Philharmonia Voices

Choirs of the Royal Academy of Music

Royal College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Trinity Laban Conservatore of Music and Dance (chorus director: Aidan Oliver)

Philharmonia Orchestra

Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

Opportunities to hear, let alone to conduct, Gurrelieder do not come along very often. Simon Rattle must have had more of the latter than most. What a way, then, for Esa-Pekka Salonen to approach his sixtieth birthday, with a work he had conducted so successfully with this same orchestra, the Philharmonia, in this same hall, not far off a decade ago. (That performance was recorded, and released on Signum Classics.)

The opening Prelude glistened, lacking nothing in warmth or almost pointillistic potential. Salonen was no more likely to wallow than Boulez might have done, and all the better for it. Here one heard – almost saw – water and ice. It flowed, ran, even stood with commendable flexibility, suggestive of a tone poem (which, in a way, it is, even when words intervene). Particularly intriguing was his orchestral balancing, subtle yet telling, highlighting yet never exaggerating the music’s darker undercurrents: pitch, timbre, harmony. The later Schoenberg is not so far away: one only has to listen. This was music after Götterdämmerung as well as after Tristan: unquestionably ‘after Wagner’, in far more than the most obvious ways.

Alas, Robert Dean Smith’s Waldemar often proved something of a trial. An older-sounding Waldemar is fine, repeated uncertainty of pitch rather less so. For much of the first part in particular, he was at best effortful, an especial pity when Salonen proved so adept at balancing those tone-poem, even symphonic tendencies (Pelleas und Melisande often came to mind) with the music’s roots in the song-cycle tradition. (Schoenberg’s first conception had been of a shorter cycle for voice and piano. Zemlinsky would recall that the songs ‘were wonderfully beautiful and truly novel – however we both had the impression that, on that account, they had little prospect of winning a prize.’) There was no denying the through-composed nature of Schoenberg’s writing, but nor is there, after all, in what we generally consider the very first song-cycle, An die ferne Geliebte. Fortunately, Camilla Tilling proved far more able than Dean Smith not only to ride the orchestra but also to make something of the words and phrases, although, to be fair, when foretelling his haunting, this Waldemar proved more convincing. There was plenty elsewhere to ravish: not least the combination of delicacy and splendour from Tilling and upper strings as Tove bade her love join her in raising golden goblets, Tristan-like, albeit with a decidedly æstheticist twist, to mighty, beautifying death (dem mächtig verschönenden Tod). It seemed telling and indeed touching, perhaps indicative of Salonen’s plans for the Ring, that the chords presaging and indeed furthering Tove’s departure from the stage echoed so clearly in combination of harmony and timbre the magnificent, malevolent world of Hagen.

Michelle DeYoung entered stage-right as if a figure from Klimt. (I know it is far too obvious an association, but demeanour and dress were so strongly suggestive that I shall indulge myself.) Jill Crowther’s English horn recalled to us an alte – or perhaps better, an ältere – Weise. Yet even before the Wood-dove sang, Schoenberg’s interlude had proved a kaleidoscopic realm of love and terror, love as terror; she only put it into words – but how! – what we (mostly) already knew. DeYoung offered a song variegated dramatically as well as tonally, almost a little – well, not so very little – cantata in its own right. Her richness of tone against the darkness of harmony and orchestral colour both reminded us of Salonen’s and Schoenberg’s presentiments at the opening, whilst leading us to a shattering climax. Tod/death: after that, life could only fade away – or could it?

The opening of the Second Part quite rightly sounded as if a digest of what had gone before – only, as it would in one of Wagner’s narrations, be it verbal, orchestral, or both, with difference of detail, of standpoint, of import. Dean Smith proved more imploring than angry, but that worked in its way. The aftermath of Waldemar’s outburst was shockingly prolonged – in the best way – by Salonen. Monumental was the word for it.

Variegation again proved the key to the Wild Hunt. Neither here nor elsewhere was there any absence of power to the outstanding massed choral forces, but heft is not enough, nor did it have to be. Salonen ensured an array of colour, even when Schoenberg apparently confronted him and us with blocks of sound. The terror of the first ghostly cry, in reaction to, or perhaps oblivious to, the handsomely dark bass-baritone observations of David Soar’s Peasant, proved quite something: several leagues beyond anything to be heard or even imagined in Der Freischütz. The proper entry of the chorus sounded like nothing so much as Götterdämmerung on acid – which it essentially is. It was, however, the aftermath that truly chilled. So much is in Schoenberg’s scoring here, yet I do not think before now I had quite realised how much. Dean Smith at last recaptured something of Tristan’s delirium, movingly so, as the orchestra seemed to engage in act of self-dissolution – again, as much in timbre as in harmony, before reconstituting itself for what was yet to come.

Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s Klaus-Narr perhaps inevitably suggested Mime: even his orchestral ‘introduction’ seemed to do so. This seemed, however, a more ambiguous ‘character’ still, transformations in mood and/or self-projection of mood disconcertingly yet, in their way, honestly quicksilver. His reflections on – mocking of? – salvation rightly left one uneasy yet wanting to know more. ‘Dann muss ich eingehn im Himmels Gnaden… Na, und dann mag Gott sich selber gnaden.’ Sepulchral chorus and brass alike soon eerily set against piccolos, set the stage, so it seemed, for another orchestral rebirth, now very much an ensemble straining towards Pierrot lunaire. Nothing would ever be the same again – and perhaps, just perhaps, such had been the work of this ‘fool’.

Step forward Barbara Sukowa, as spellbinding as she had been for Salonen in 2009 – or indeed for Claudio Abbado on his Vienna recording. This Speaker was delirious, yet delightful; or was that our æstheticising something too close for comfort? Not only Pierrot, but a whole century’s worth of music thereafter flashed before our ears. ‘Still! Was mag der Wind nur wollen?’ Did these hallucinations, if that be what they were, speak of a bad or a good trip? Schoenberg, as so often, resisted the either/or. Violin and clarinet acknowledged Wagner once again, now the Siegfried-Idyll, paving the way to Schoenberg’s final, glorious, yet ultimately never quite convincing paean to the sun(god). We revelled in that final chorus, yet, whether or not we wished to do so, could never quite shake off those intimations of the ‘air of another planet’. The future was both upon us and not. Schoenberg’s time had come.

BBC SO/Karabits - Schnelzer, Ravel, and Bartók, 13 March 2015

Barbican Hall

Albert Schnelzer – Tales from Suburbia (world premiere)

Ravel – Suite: Ma mère l’Oye

Bartok – Bluebeard’s Castle

Judit – Michelle DeYoung

Bluebeard – Gábor Bretz

João Henriques (director, narrator)

 

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Kirill Karabits (conductor).

Albert Schnelzer’s Tales of Suburbia, written in 2012 as a co-commission from the BBC and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, here received its first performance. Lasting about a quarter of an hour, it seemed to me akin more to a vaguely, generically ‘atmospheric’ television score – doubtless fine in its place – than a concert work. Written for a large orchestra in a language at least a century out of date, it sounded like a diluted version of early-twentieth-century conservatism. The composer wrote, ‘… this is where I live. Mahler once said that he wanted his symphonies to encompass the whole world. I would settle for just suburbia.’ The seemingly aimless meandering that ensued suggested his commentary had not been intended ironically. My previous encounter with Schnelzer’s work had been a performance, the first in this country, of his Emperor Akbar. If that had left me nonplussed, this left me less than that. Mention, though, should be made of the solos from leader, Natalie Chee; if only she had been playing Szymanowski…

 

Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite was played charmingly, if not necessarily with quite the enchantment or precision that the greatest performances bring. Still, there was much to admire in this account from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Kirill Karabits. A stately opening ‘Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant’ seemed perfectly poised – as, of course, the movement is – between the Pavane pour une infante défunte and the later Ravel of Le Tombeau de Couperin. It did not lack a little luxuriance either. I wondered whether ‘Laidoronnette’ was taken too quickly; its treatment verged upon the harrying. However, there remained a sense of the parts contributing to a greater whole, never more so than in the concluding ‘Le Jardin féerique,’ which pretty much lived up to its name.

Bluebeard’s Castle was given a fine performance: unquestionably the highlight of the evening for me. I look forward next month to reporting back from Calixto Bieito’s new staging, in a double-bill with Gianni Schicchi, but here, a spare concert staging, imaginatively conceived by João Henriques, kept the work where it arguably belongs, in the theatre of the imagination. Henriques acted as Narrator too, offering (in English translation) an inviting, probing reading of that crucial Prologue. It seemed to offer choices; yet, at the same time, we knew that Fate would win. We certainly did once Bartók’s score began its work. (If only a good few other operas could say as much as it does, in the time it takes to do so!) Arriving with seven suitcases upon a trolley, one for each door, this pairing of Bluebeard and Judit increasingly suggested both that there were things better left packed up, and that the Forbidden Question – those inevitable shades of Lohengrin – would be asked.

Michelle DeYoung was strong yet imploring, totally assured in her delivery of Bartók’s lines, bringing them, quite rightly, close to a Hungarian Pelléas. She shuddered with the orchestra, if not necessarily at the same time (if that makes any sense!) This Judit was transformed before our very ears, De Young expertly tracing Bartók’s – and Béla Balázs’s – arc from triumph to tragedy. Gábor Bretz sounded more youthful and, indeed, more aristocratic than one often hears, exercising a dark, mysterious allure; one could understand why she had fallen for him. One sensed that there was not only more to him than we knew; there was probably more than Bluebeard himself consciously knew. For this is a sadistic drama of the mind (perfectly suited, one might say, to next month’s pairing with that master-sadist, Puccini).

All the while, the orchestra under Karabits shaped and commented upon the drama – unlike but also unlike Debussy in his sole completed opera. (There are surely few more singular operatic masterpieces than Pelléas and Bluebeard’s Castle.) Maybe this was because Ravel had been heard before the interval, though I think not entirely so; in any case, I felt there were a few occasions upon which colour and ‘atmosphere’ were perhaps exalted at the expense of more ‘Teutonic’ structural concerns. (I am doubtless, however, consciously or otherwise, making odious comparisons, having heard Boulez conduct the work twice. What I should give to have that opportunity just once again!) The opening of that fifth door overwhelmed as it must, the disappointing electronic organ notwithstanding. (Another cause for Sir Simon Rattle to address?) And yet, Karabits seemed to impress upon us that this was not to be, that there was something unreal to what our ears led us to ‘see’. That was an exaltation of colour that was worth hearing.

 

Philharmonia/Salonen - Bluebeard's Castle, 3 November 2011

Royal Festival Hall

Debussy – Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Bartók – Piano Concerto no.3
Bartók – Bluebeard’s Castle (semi-staged)

Yefim Bronfman (piano)
Judit – Michelle DeYoung
Bluebeard – Sir John Tomlinson
Juliet Stevenson (narrator)

Nick Hillel (director)
David Edwards (staging)
Adam Wiltshire (set designs)
David Holmes (lighting)

Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)


Bartók’s only opera, a masterpiece to rank with other sole works in the genre such as Fidelio and Pelléas et Mélisande, was chosen for the climax of the Philharmonia’s year-long series, ‘Infernal Dance: Inside the World of Béla Bartók’. It was the obvious and fitting choice, both as idea and reality. But first came a far from negligible opening to the concert: a visit from Debussy, albeit in still earlier guise than the composer of Pelléas, and the third of Bartók’s three piano concertos, the soloist again Yefim Bronfman.

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is pretty much universally considered to mark the dawn of twentieth-century music. (The programme note by Malcom Gillies presented Debussy’s work as a candidate, but oddly claimed ‘some date it as late as 1913, with Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps.’ No one would gainsay the importance of The Rite of Spring, yet, by the same token, surely no one would date the beginning of twentieth-century music after Schoenberg’s emancipation of the dissonance.) In the hands of Esa-Pekka Salonen – he only picked up a baton later, preferring to mould the music here more freely – Prélude à l’après-midi received a fine performance. Samuel Coles’s opening flute solo was not only not conducted by Salonen; he did not even herald it, leaving Coles to begin in his own time. He did not disappoint; nor did Chris Cowie’s equally fine oboe solo work. Salonen shaped an initially languid reading, soon bathed in the warm glow of the Philharmonia strings. There was certainly a sense of the novelty of form we can all too readily take for granted, but which would point the way not only to later Debussy and to a number of works by Bartók and other composers of his generation, but even to post-war composers such as Boulez, as conductor one of Debussy’s – and Bartók’s – foremost interpreters. Flexibility of tempo proved the key that unlocked malleability of form. Finally came that undefinable, ineffable magic that marks a distinguished performance of this great work.

Such lyricism also informed the opening of the piano concerto, Bronfman presenting it as if in a single breath, foretelling an over-arching melodic approach. The tempo adopted, however, sounded slower than usual; moreover, the general style adopted was more classical, post-Mozartian even, than one often hears. Sometimes I wanted a little more fire from both soloist and orchestra in the first movement: though an interesting reading, it was ultimately a little underwhelming. The cool but not cold dignity with which Bronfman announced his opening statements in the slow movement was striking. Thereafter, the extraordinary night-music – surely the most interesting part of a concerto that does not always show Bartók at his best – was piquant and lively under Salonen. He clearly relished the colours that point back to Ravel but also look forward to Messiaen. A relatively cool classicism paid dividends with the counterpoint of the finale, but elsewhere much sounded a little too relaxed, at times verging on the lethargic. At one point, the pace noticeably picked up, but it seemed more of a correction than an intensification. I have no idea why the lights were dimmed at one point and then turned back up; it was probably a mistake, but it would be nice to think that it was a warning shot to the serried ranks of coughers.

Bluebeard’s Castle was performed in a semi-staged version, directed by Nick Hillel. Bartók’s opera is a strange case, in that in many respects it seems almost made to be performed in concert: its interiority, as heralded by the prologue, may even work better if it compels the listener to direct the work in his head. I am not sure that the production, based upon projections onto a ‘motorised shape’ above the orchestra and a simple enough design around the borders of the stage, added very much, but if it liberated the imagination of some unimaginative souls then it will have done some good and little harm. So far as I could tell, the designs, projections, and lighting all worked as they should.

Woodland film rendered the opening music more than usually Pelléas-like; that seemed to suit Salonen’s strategy too, at this stage characterised by what one might paradoxically call a subdued teeming of orchestral life, rendering contrast of Judit’s viewing the torture chamber all the greater. What we saw here was rather literally representative: some instruments of torture, followed by red for blood – though oddly, the red seemed more redolent of socialist propaganda posters, which, Bartók’s politics notwithstanding, I cannot believe was the intention. Such a colour-based approach might actually have worked better with Schoenberg’s contemporary Die glückliche Hand. On the other hand, visual evocation of diamonds complemented the fantasy so finely painted by the Philharmonia’s harps and celesta. Even then, however, Michelle DeYoung’s facial expressions, let alone her vocalism, had much more to say than any film projection, and still more so in the subsequent case of the flowers. DeYoung offered more than ample compensation for the previously advertised Measha Brueggergosman; hers was a powerfully dramatic and beautifully sung performance, equally alert to the demands of text and melodic line. She was formidable, not in the slightest pathetic; one could readily understand how she had her fateful way. Bluebeard’s defiant pride in the splendours of his kingdom was far better expressed by Sir John Tomlinson’s performance, noble yet wounded, than by turning the lights on and showing a few clouds on the move.

I took a while to be convinced by Salonen’s reading, wondering if the tension was sagging a little in the middle; this was certainly not a razor-sharp Bluebard’s Castle in the manner of Boulez. And yet, matters would become clearer, the greater strategy paying off handsomely, when the cold menace of the increasingly modernist-sounding orchestral palette asserted itself as Judit learned of her predecessors, likewise in the cumulative terror leading up to the final revelation. (DeYoung was superb here too.) The post-Wagnerian orchestral glory of the final climax put me in mind of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, but it was the desolation of Tomlinson thereafter that moved most of all. As with so much of the production, the appearance of Judit as an apparition at the back of stage did no violence to the work, but might better have been discarded.

LSO/Boulez: Schoenberg, Pintscher, and Bartók, 11 May 2008

Barbican Hall

Schoenberg - Die glückliche Hand, Op.18
Matthias Pintscher - Osiris (British premiere)
Bartók - Bluebeard's Castle

Michelle DeYoung (mezzo-soprano)
Peter Fried (bass)
BBC Singers
London Symphony Orchestra
Pierre Boulez (conductor)

And so, we came to the second of Boulez's two LSO concerts this season. The performance of Die glückliche Hand was magnificent. Although Peter Fried's contribution was solid rather than inspiring, this seemed to matter little, since the real drama appeared to take place in the orchestra and in the chorus. The phantasmagoria of colours Boulez drew from the LSO was quite a revelation - and an extraordinary contrast with his rather flat Sony recording. (I do wonder whether the recordings are more at fault than the performances in his Sony Schoenberg series, but nevertheless remain sure that his greater experience, not least in the music of Mahler, has paid dividends in his more recent Schoenberg, which demands to be recorded.) Wild terror, rare beauty, and sometimes plain - or rather anything-but-plain - weirdness were all there in abundance during the unfoldling of this Expressionist nightmare. Details such as the early harp ostinato were projected with that clarity which eludes most musicians yet seems to be second nature to Boulez. To begin with, I wondered whether the BBC Singers sounded too much like individual voices, rather than 'a choir', but on reflection - and being convinced by their performance - appreciated that it was almost certainly my conception rather than theirs that was at fault. If one considers not only Schoenberg's wishes, but also the dictates of the drama, then mysterious, threatening, cajoling 'voices' is really just what they should be. I find the neglect of this score incomprehensible; let us hope that this performance will have left, as it should, many in the audience hungry for more.

The first British performance of Matthias Pintscher's Osiris received a commanding performance. (Consider the fortune of the composer who has Boulez to conduct the earliest performances of his works!) The early string-based textures, stemming from individual, twisting lines put me in mind of late Mahler (the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies). There was, moreover, a strong sense of this being something akin to a late-Romantic tone poem. This is not to say that the harmonies were straightforwardly of Mahler's or even Berg's world, but equally they were not wholly divorced from those composers' worlds. The intensification of the textures brought with it an 'updating' of the style, almost as if we were being asked to take a synoptic journey through the modernist inheritance. Ligeti's Ramifications was a work that came strongly to mind. This may of course merely represent my attempts at understanding rather than anything more fundamental to the work itself, but I wonder. As the textures diversified further, and the rest of the orchestra played an increasingly prominent role, I thought also of Messiaen, especially as the themes sounded more fragmentary. The coincidence with some of Messiaen's bird-song may again be no more than that. There were superb solos from the contrabass clarinettist and principal trumpet; the percussionists increasingly enjoyed a field day. Surely no section of the orchestra has benefited more from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I had no doubt of the strong narrative drive of the work, which further hearings would doubtless render clearer. In Pintscher's overall approach to modernist tradition, I was reminded of Wolfgang Rihm, which is not to say that one could mistake one for the other.

The account of Bluebeard's Castle (sadly, minus Prologue) was for the most part excellent, although I did not react so ecstatically as some in the audience. There was a section, a little after the duly overwhelming opening of the fifth door, in which I thought the orchestra - and perhaps its direction too - sounded just a little laboured, tired even. There were also occasions when its rhythmic bite might have been more pronounced, although this was doubtless to some extent a product of Boulez's rather Debussyan conception of the textures: closer to The Wooden Prince and even to Pelléas than to more typically 'Hungarian' readings. Fried was somewhat disappointing, variable in his ability to project the text over the orchestra. His timbre was suitably black, but often rather dry. (Think of John Tomlinson in this repertoire, and one appreciates what was missing.) Michelle DeYoung had no such difficulties, and also proved herself unfailingly musical with regard to the general - and particular - musical 'line'. Orchestral soli were without exception of the highest order, and the work's conclusion, subsiding into eery nothingness, was simply breathtaking. There were certainly most of the ingredients for a great performance here and, perhaps on another occasion and with another Bluebeard, this is what it would have been.