BRITTEN: The Prince of the Pagodas (complete ballet) / Hallé Orch.; Kahchun Wong, cond / Hallé CD HLD 7565
This is the first new recording of Benjamin Britten’s fascinating but oft-ignored 1956 ballet score since the one recorded by the late Oliver Knussen with the London Sinfonietta in 1990. The only other “complete” recording I’ve been able to track down is Britten’s own with the Royal Opera House Orchestra for Decca in 1957.
The story behind this score is perhaps better known than the music itself, having been written shortly after Britten and his partner Peter Pears returned to England from a tour of the South Seas and especially the island of Bali, whose music had fascinated the composer since he first heard a sampling of it back in 1939. Although there is quite a bit of interesting music in the score, even from the beginning it was determined that Britten had written too much music, so little scenes and dances here and there were cut. It was this rather abridged version that Britten recorded in 1957. Both the Knussen recording and this new one led by Kahchun Wong are complete.
Britten & Pears in Bali, January 1956
One of the reason why The Prince of the Pagodas didn’t last long was that the story was rather convoluted to begin with, being split, in fact, into two separate but related stories. The first is that of a King who, like Shakespeare’s Lear, confers his kingdom on the unworthy daughter rather than the sweet, loyal one, Belle Rose. Yet even in this part of the ballet, we get some complications that are distracting and make the audiences’ attention wane, particularly the fact that Belle Rose’s constant companion is a wise fool who acts as a sort of shaman, It is he who convinces Belle Rose to travel to the land of the Pagodas to find love and happiness. There are four Kings who court her, one each from the North, East, South and West, all of whom she rejects. In a bizarre twist of fate reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast, Belle Rose encounters a rather revolting “salamander man” who explains that he is really a handsome prince who loves her, but cannot reclaim that form unless she loves him back. As usual in full-scale ballets of this sort, there are a lot of incidental dances that take up most of Act III.
Choreographer Kenneth MacMillan revived the ballet in a new production in 1989, paring away much of the ephemeral music and making the ballet more about the coming of age of Belle Rose and the discovery of her feelings as a woman.
Yet for all the complexities and partial failures of the ballet as a whole, Britten’s score is one of his most fascinating, original and rhythmically “regular.” Since it was written for dancers, he had to maintain some sort of constant rhythmic thread in the music, and this in turn led him to completely revamp his then-current style of composition, which was based on the use of strophic lines within a narrow scale range and an amorphous rhythmic base. As a result, Britten almost (but not quite) returned to his composition methods of the 1930s, which many classical aficionados consider his prime. The liner notes suggest a comparison between this score and that of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, and that is a fair comparison, yet there are a couple of dances that echo his stay in the United States, sounding a bit like something that Aaron Copland might have written for Billy the Kid, in addition to several sections that borrow ideas from Stravinsky and Bartók, although, in the end, all of this is filtered through Britten’s own aesthetic.
Photo from a later production, Belle Rose and the “Salamander Prince”
Now comes the really interesting part of this story (at least, to me). Listening to Britten’s own recording of the score, one hears a combination of the Balinese musical effects—created not with authentic instruments but, cleverly, with new combination of Western classical instruments—with a surprisingly warm-sounding orchestra and flexible, “bouncy” rhythms. Those who are familiar with Britten’s conducting of a wide spectrum of music—a series of live concerts featuring the music of Bridge, Rossini, and other composers was once available from BBC Music in addition to his superb Decca recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti—will not be surprised by this. Britten is rightly acknowledged as one of England’s finest classical pianists but, for some reason, his conducting prowess is taken for granted. This recording, which shows the masterful way he could handle tricky, complex music (despite its being almost entirely tonal) and make it sound flowing and natural, should be Exhibit A.
And the reason I say that is because Knussen, who I regarded very highly as an excellent conductor, was NOT able to reproduce this supple rhythmic feeling in his recording of the ballet (which, as I noted earlier, included all of the music). The London Sinfonietta under Knussen plays all of the rhythms in a stiff, flat-footed manner, with zero flexibility and no sense that this is ballet music. He makes it sound like just an orchestral suite, and without the spring and bounce in the music it loses much of its attractiveness and charm. In addition, Knussen’s digital recording has a harder, shallower sound than Britten’s; it was made for Virgin Classics, which at that time was noted for its sometimes harsh sound qualities. But putting the engineering aside, Knussen was simply unable to capture the right “sound” of this music, yet one more example of why “historically-informed performances” are nonsense. If you can’t emulate what the composer himself did, on a permanent record which anyone can listen to (and I can cite at least a dozen other examples going as far back as the acoustic period, primary among them Ravel’s own recording of his famous Bolero from 1930), how can you claim that what you are doing bears any resemblance to performance practices YOU’VE NEVER HEARD and only have a few sketchy written reviews to go by?
Please understand, I am not picking on Kahchun Wong. He is obviously a good, conscientious conductor who thinks he is serving the music well, but perhaps because the Knussen recording is complete and Britten’s isn’t, that is the one he seems to have used as a model for his recorded performance. Mind you, within these limitations the performance is excellently played, but the “flow” of the music has much more of a Stravinskian rigor about it than a Britten-like swagger. In addition, although the sound quality is not quite as thin and hard-sounding as Knussen’s, it too lacks warmth.
To some listeners, this probably won’t mean much. Wong’s performance is a solid one, but for a work that is not well known by the majority of classical listeners, many hearing it for the first time through this recording will get a somewhat flawed impression of the music. It’s sort of like having Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony played by a MIDI instead of an orchestra of human beings (yes, I know, don’t give them any ideas). Thus I recommend that you acquire the original Britten recording and, if you are so inclined, fill in the missing segments from either the Knussen or the Wong recording. You’ll be glad you did because then, most of it will provide you with the music performed as the composer intended it to sound.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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