佳佳唱片

巴爾托克: 獨幕歌劇(藍鬍子的城堡)
蘇珊娜．馬爾契 指揮
赫爾辛基愛樂樂團

Composed in 1911, Bluebeard's Castle is Bela Bartok's only opera – a radical masterpiece which has secured a place alongside the other innovative music dramas of the same period, from Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande to Berg's Wozzeck. Planning to write a one-act opera, Bartok settled on a libretto by Bela Balazs 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.

Balazs 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. The single act centres on the successive opening of the castle's seven doors, and Bartok's music brings across the horrors of the blood-drenched torture chamber, the steely power of the armoury and the glitter of jewels in the treasury as well as the interplay of increasingly feverish questionings from Judit and defiant responses from Bluebeard. Susanna Malkki and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra have already proved their Bartok 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 Voros, the team here performs Bartok's darkly glittering, shimmering and threatening score in a live recording from 2020. 

Bela Bartok (1881—1945)
Bluebeard's Castle
Opera in One Act, Op. 11 · Libretto by Bela Balazs
1 ) Prologue: 'Haj regő rejtem' 1'56
2 ) Opening Scene: 'Megerkeztünk' 13'42
3 ) First Door: 'Jaj!' — 'Mit latsz? Mit latsz?' 4'18
4 ) Second Door: 'Mit latsz?' — 'Szaz kegyetlen szornyű fegyver…' 4'13
5 ) Third Door: 'Oh, be sok kincs!' 2'24
6 ) Fourth Door: 'Oh! Viragok! Oh! Illatos kert!' 4'45
7 ) Fifth Door: 'Ah!' — 'Lasd ez az en birodalmam…' 6'32
8 ) Sixth Door: 'Csendes feher tavat latok' 12'44
9 ) Seventh Door: 'Lasd a regi aszszonyokat' 9'20
TT: 60'30
Mika Kares bass (Duke Bluebeard)
Szilvia Voros mezzo-soprano (Judit)
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
Susanna Malkki conductor