When a well-established 20th-century composer turns 143, as Bela Bartok did this week, you might assume that the music composed can spring no further surprises. Sample the first track, however, on the third of the Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard’s albums devoted to Bartok’s orchestral output, and you could still be pulled up short.
What work is the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra playing, with its magical, slightly Wagnerian sounds suggesting the natural world waking up via a sustained and tremulous C-major chord, dappled with horn calls and early morning mist? It’s the pantomime ballet The Wooden Prince, completed in 1917 shortly before Bartok wrote its more famous and lurid stablemate, The Miraculous Mandarin. The score should be much better known, and Dausgaard’s recording of
