Benjamin Britten
's 1956 ballet
The Prince of the Pagodas
, an old-school type of work with kings and princesses and an exotic setting, will be unknown to many listeners. It was recorded in 1990 under the baton of
Oliver Knussen
once in a truncated form by
Britten
himself, although aside from those two, it is absent from recording catalogs. It's quite a find, and this was probably what put this fine performance by the
Hallé Orchestra
and new conductor
Kahchun Wong
on classical best-seller charts in the late autumn of 2024.
Wong
identifies the work's most salient feature: its rather uncannily accurate representation of Balinese gamelan music (accomplished entirely with instruments of Western orchestras), in his notes as he talks about his study of this Indonesian tradition in his native Singapore. Sample "The pagodas revolve like merry-go-rounds." But what's interesting is that he added the Balinese element midway through his work on the ballet, after traveling to Bali and making a close study of the music, noting correctly that it was "as complicated as
Schoenberg
." That might sound slapdash, but it doesn't come off that way; the Balinese element is merely one in a series of surprises that unfolds over the course of this colorful and high-spirited work. Listen to the parodically serialist "Variation of the King of the West" from the first act. An imaginative choreographer would have no trouble staging this ballet, whose setting is an unspecified Eastern one, not specifically Balinese; the tale is a fascinating mixture of East and West, and is undoubtedly a neglected find among
's later works. ~ James Manheim