Est 1923

Bartók Duke Bluebeard's Castle

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Béla Bartók

Genre:

Opera

Label: 20th Century Classics

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 58

Mastering:

ADD

Catalogue Number: 423 236-2GC

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Duke Bluebeard's Castle Béla Bartók, Composer
Bavarian State Orchestra
Béla Bartók, Composer
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Duke Bluebeard, Baritone
Julia Varady, Judith, Mezzo soprano
Wolfgang Sawallisch, Conductor

Composer or Director: Béla Bartók

Genre:

Opera

Label: Masterworks

Media Format: Vinyl

Media Runtime: 0

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 44523

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Duke Bluebeard's Castle Béla Bartók, Composer
Adám Fischer, Conductor
Béla Bartók, Composer
Eva Marton, Judith, Mezzo soprano
Hungarian State Orchestra
Samuel Ramey, Duke Bluebeard, Baritone

Composer or Director: Béla Bartók

Genre:

Opera

Label: Masterworks

Media Format: Cassette

Media Runtime: 0

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 40-44523

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Duke Bluebeard's Castle Béla Bartók, Composer
Adám Fischer, Conductor
Béla Bartók, Composer
Eva Marton, Judith, Mezzo soprano
Hungarian State Orchestra
Samuel Ramey, Duke Bluebeard, Baritone
Bluebeard's Castle is a difficult opera to cast. Bluebeard himself must either be a bass who can get up to a high F or a baritone who can get down to low G. In the former category, to which Samuel Ramey belongs the usual risks are that he will sound unsuitably fatherly or will be uncomfortably tense in the upper register. Ramey avoids both hazards with ease: he combines gravity with believable youth, and has no problems with the upper reaches of the part. His is a slightly cool reserved, soft-grained Bluebeard, there is no swell of homage in the last scene when he hails his former wives as ''immortal, unforgotten'', but you may well prefer his sobriety to Fischer-Dieskau's meticulous but at times melodramatic expressive shading of every syllable. And in the grand phrases describing his kingdom, between the brazen paeans that follow the opening of the fifth door, Ramsey sustains the majestically slow tempo set by Adam Fischer quite superbly.
Judith, more awkwardly still, should really be a mezzo with a top C, not a soprano with a serviceable extension down into the mezzo range. Marton is the latter, and a soprano with a distinct cutting edge to her tone at times, as well as a flutter that can become ungainly under pressure. But she is convincingly ardent and womanly, acts well (real passion and urgency to the scene before the opening of the seventh door) and uses both her words and an effective mezza voce with intelligence: this is the best recorded performance I have heard from her.
The slowness of the music for the fifth door is characteristic of Fischer's approach to the score. So is its colour (dominated by the brass, not by the organ) and the fact that it is manifestly not the opera's summit: the hugest climaxes in this account are on either side of the seventh door, and Fischer leads up to the first of them with a tension that is increased rather than diminished by his deliberate tempo and his measured silences. It is a less overtly dramatic account than some (than Sawallisch's, say), with pictorial details less vividly coloured, but it has an impressive brooding solemnity and a greater sense than most readings of a drama emerging from and receding into darkness.
I might prefer Sawallisch's version, even so (the Bavarian orchestra is finer than the Hungarian, the DG recording richer and better balanced than the CBS, which favours the singers unduly) were it not for the over-acting which mars Fischer-Dieskau's eloquence and the fact that Varady's intensity often degenerates into a nagging shrewishness. Sooner either of these, however, than Ferencsik's performance on Hungaroton (his third for that label), in which Evgeny Nesterenko is a nobly black-voiced but rather impassive Bluebeard, Elena Obraztsova a grotesquely strident hectoring Judith. The new CBS, by the way, is a co-production with Hungaroton, and both companies have in the past produced accounts of Bluebeard's Castle which, if reissued on CD, would prove formidable rivals to anything in the current catalogue: Pierre Boulez's 1976 recording with Tatiana Troyanos and Siegmund Nimsgern (CBS 76518, 9/76) and Ferencsik's of 1971, with Katalin Kasza and Gyorgy Melis (Hungaroton SLPXI 1486, 6/72).'

Bartók Bluebeard's Castle

Duke Bluebeard's Castle

Bartók Duke Bluebeard's Castle

Duke Bluebeard's Castle

Bartók Duke Bluebeard's Castle

Duke Bluebeard's Castle

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