BSO Recordings gave us no fewer than three winners at last year’s Awards, including Recording of the Year for the DVD of Kirill Petrenko and Simon Stone’s groundbreaking 2019 production of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt. Filmed the same year, however, the label’s latest offering is very different, a curio at best, and somewhat anticlimactic after all that went before.

This is not, as you might initially think, a double bill of Stravinsky’s barbed comedy and Tchaikovsky’s bittersweet fairy tale, but effectively a music theatre piece entitled Mavra/Iolanta, the brainchild, one suspects (we are not explicitly told), of its director Axel Ranisch, in which alternate scenes from the two operas are interwoven to form a composite whole. Both works are given complete, apart from Vaudémont’s Romance (a late addition to Tchaikovsky’s original score), though Mavra’s Overture is wrenched out of order and reused later as an interlude, and each score comes with revised orchestration: Mavra in a chamber version by Paul Phillips for an onstage ensemble, who also form Tchaikovsky’s stage band; and Iolanta in an arrangement for reduced forces by Richard Whilds, possibly in order to fit the work into the Cuvilliés Theatre’s small pit.

Ranisch’s starting point is the idea that Mavra’s narrative is initially a figment of Iolanta’s imagination as she plays with her dolls, whose life-size doubles then become the protagonists of Stravinsky’s opera. As Iolanta progresses, however, it becomes apparent that the toys have lives of their own: Vasily and Parasha go out dancing, for instance, during the Iolanta/Vaudémont love duet. Apart from the Stravinskian incursions and the curious presence onstage of René’s wheelchair-bound mother (unaccountably described in the booklet notes as ‘The Patriarch’), Ranisch plays the Tchaikovsky relatively straight until his sudden introduction of a shockingly gory plot twist finally forces the dolls to intervene, which in turn leads to havoc in the final scene of Mavra with which Ranisch ends. Jolting between scores, meanwhile, does neither work any favours. Tchaikovsky’s heart-stopping introduction of strings and harp after Iolanta’s bitter woodwind prelude, for instance, goes for absolutely nothing when the opening scene of Mavra is wedged between the two, the first of several comparable casualties during the performance’s course.

It’s well played and sung, though Markus Suikhonen’s René sometimes lacks the requisite authority, and Oğulcan Yılmaz could do with more focus in his tone in Ibn-Hakia’s aria. Mirjam Mesak, however, makes an entirely convincing Iolanta, poised between innocence and experience, and singing with blazing conviction opposite Long Long’s lyrically ardent Vaudémont. Oleg Davydov – strutting his stuff in leather and decades too young for the old retainer described in both libretto and subtitles – sounds good as Bertrand, while Boris Prýgl does much with the little Tchaikovsky gives him as Robert. The Mavra cast are particularly excellent, given they’re hidden behind masks most of the time and Ranisch’s direction is exactingly physical. Anna El-Khashem is the spirited Parasha, and Vasily’s angular vocal lines suit Freddie De Tommaso uncommonly well. In the pit, Alevtina Ioffe conducts with bags of passion and detail, but musically and dramatically this doesn’t, I’m afraid, by any means add up to a satisfactory whole.