Question: Which two works came to fruition in 1911 (one written, the other premièred), were among their respective composer’s most personal compositions, involve landscape tone-painting, a man and woman singing of love and loss and end with the single repeated word ‘ewig…ewig’? OK, I’m bending the rules a little by quoting the German translation of one of the works but, still, it was a useful exercise listening to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle in quick succession. The parallels certainly stand and rarely more so than on this thoughtfully moulded performance under Peter Eötvös, for my money one of today’s leading Bartók interpreters.

This is very much a ‘theatre of the mind’ kind of performance. There’s no spoken Prologue, no ghostly exhalations and no stage action to speak of, the sort that Erik Smith famously contrived for his justly lauded 1965 Decca production under István Kertész. Not that I’m an uncritical fan of that performance, finding Christa Ludwig and Walter Berry just a mite too cosy for what is after all a chilling and extremely inward drama. For although Cornelia Kallisch is vocally less smooth than either Ludwig, or Anne Sofie von Otter for Bernard Haitink, she more than compensates with a credible humanness and growing sense of horror. Listen to her gut-wrenching cry as Bluebeard, masterfully portrayed here by Péter Fried, opens the door to his torture chamber (Ludwig sounds quite inhibited by comparison), or to the elation she conveys when the fifth door reveals Bluebeard’s ‘spacious kingdom’. Suddenly, the concept ‘opera’ vanishes and you’re standing alongside her, awe-struck and intimidated.

Most operas rely on the musical properties of language but Bluebeard is built on them: another aspect of this performance worth singling out is the way Eötvös’ phrasing is always attentive to the speech-like inflections of Bartók’s writing. He delves among the orchestra’s inner voices – the middle and lower strings come off especially well – and saves his biggest gestures for the score’s grandest moments, the Fifth Door and Judith’s eventual incarceration being the most obvious testing points. Orchestral playing is mostly good, though Haitink’s Berlin recording, which is also live, achieves greater refinement and a more opulent tonal blend. That, too, is a fine production, probably a safer overall recommendation, though Hänssler’s sound is never less than good. Some readers will remain faithful to Kertész (a classic of its kind) or to Haitink, whose EMI Bluebeard is singularly moving, and yet the perception and idiomatic accent of this performance are enough to place it in the front rank, if not quite at the top of the list.