Bartok,Bela / Kares / Malkki - Bluebeard's Castle (Hybr) (Sealed) (SACD)

Composed in 1911, Bluebeard's Castle is B?la Bart?k's only opera a radical masterpiece which has secured a place alongside the other innovative music dramas of the same period, from Debussy's Pell?as et M?lisande to Berg's Wozzeck. Planning to write a one-act opera, Bart?k settled on a libretto by B?la Bal?zs with the kind of surreal and/or macabre themes that would soon feature in his two ballets, The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin. The main source for the libretto text was a play by Maeterlinck, a retelling of Perrault's gruesome tale of Barbe-Bleue, the sinister yet strangely seductive wife-killer. Bal?zs turned the drama into what he called a 'mystery play', however, and his stylisation of the story throws the weight of the drama onto stage-setting and music. Susanna M?lkki and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra have already proved their Bart?k credentials with a disc of his ballet scores which was chosen as Record of the Week in BBC Radio 3 Record Review and earned top marks in Diapason and on the website Klassik-Heute. Joined by Mika Kares as Duke Bluebeard and his Judit, the Hungarian mezzo-soprano Szilvia V?r?s, the team here performs Bart?k's darkly glittering, shimmering and threatening score in a live recording from 2020.