A careful, too relaxed Bluebeard -- where's the shock?
Marin Alsop was praised for her recent Naxos CD of The Miraculous Mandarin, but her noiton of Bartok is too smoothed out and rhythmically idle for me, two qualities that especially show up in this account of Bluebeard's Castle. Having jsut heard a reissue of a nearly fogotten CD of the opera from 1979 with Fischer-Dieskau and Julia Varady on DG, I came to this new one thinking that even if Alsop didn't have great singers, she could do mor with the orchestral score than Sawalisch on that disc.

she doesn't. This is caeful conducting of a competent provinical orchestra (the oft-recorded Bournemouth Sym.), which is bettered by almost eveyr version of this wonderful work that I've ever heard, going back to Istvan Kertesz and the Vienna Phil. in the Sixties (still a great recording). As for the two singers, Andrea Melath and Gustov Belacek, she is a touching, vulnerable Judith, paiting a monochromatic portrait of a character who has her own obsessions to counter bluebeard's supressed guilty secrets. I cringed whe I first heard Belacek curdled voice, but he is so idiomatically Hungarian that I came to appreciate the dramatic force of his Bluebeard -- still, he's no Walter Berry, fishcer-Dieskau, John Tomlinson, or Samuel Ramey in this part.

ONe final note: since Naxos is promoting Marin Alsop -- as are most critics -- as a major conductor, shouldn't they pair her with better singers? To me, hers isns't a major talent, but she is certainly near the top of the vast Naxos roster of conductors, and you'd think the label would boost her into a higher league than what we hear on this CD.