Dallapiccola’s short opera Il Prigioniero, completed in 1948, is a troubling work, its eternally relevant political message set to music that seems increasingly problematic in its bold attempt to create a post-war ‘mainstream’ style, synthesizing tonal and serial techniques. Glib though it is to talk of a ‘12-note Tosca’, this work’s eroticization of torture (most explicitly in the final encounter between prisoner and grand inquisitor), as well as the associations it creates between sacred and secular musical genres, makes comparisons with Puccini irresistible. The music, and the drama, are weakest when the rhetoric is overblown, the expression reduced to hammered-out repetitions of dissonant chords. The opera is at its best when least insistent, and when Dallapiccola’s sinuous counterpoint resists inflation into overheated climaxes. Some of the opera’s more explicitly expressionistic moments pack an undeniable punch, but when the central character is so brutally exploited and so cruelly misled, the best thing the music can do is to observe a complementary restraint.
This is a performance of many virtues, and a more than adequate replacement for the old Decca Headline account under Antal Dorati (5/75 – nla). Phyllis Bryn-Julson is cooler than the music requires in the opening scene, but once Jorma Hynninen appears the temperature rises and stays suitably high. Hynninen doesn’t always observe the quieter dynamics requested by Dallapiccola, but this is no vice in a finely sung as well as dramatically persuasive account, well supported by Salonen’s alert pacing of the score. The live recording sacrifices orchestral presence and detail, so that Dallapiccola’s writing sounds even more opaque at certain points than it actually is.
The Canti di Prigionia makes a logical coupling, but there are longueurs in this early composition in which Dallapiccola was still feeling his way forward from a relatively Stravinskian style into the world of Berg and Webern. These performances sustain the rather static textures efficiently, although as in the opera the recording seems to be seeking atmosphere in preference to maximum textural clarity.'