For decades the recording catalogue treated The Wooden Prince as a footnote — a curiosity Bartók wrote before he got properly weird. Conductors rushed past it to reach The Miraculous Mandarin, with its urban grime and modernist brutalism. Gardner and the London Philharmonic refuse that hierarchy, and the result is a release that makes you hear both pieces differently. The Wooden Prince is folk music viewed through a strange lens: pungent, earthy, rooted in Hungarian peasant idiom but refracted by a composer who had already spent years collecting folk songs in villages and was now reimagining what that material could carry. Gardner understands this double nature. The Dance of the Trees carries unnerving foreboding rather than pastoral ease. The Dance of the Waves churns rather than flows. The Dance of the Princess with the Wooden Doll has genuine rustic stamp — foot-stamping energy that doesn't condescend to its folk sources. The live recording trades Pierre Boulez's crystalline 1991 studio precision — still the clinical benchmark, still worth owning — for something more theatrically present. Gardner's pacing is deliberate and dramatically shaped in ways that recent accounts by Cristian Măcelaru and Susanna Mälkki, both technically accomplished, don't quite match. This is a conductor who has thought about the stage picture, not just the score. The Miraculous Mandarin Suite is given as fine a performance as the catalogue holds. The opening portrait of the dystopian city is brutal — Gardner earns the honking car horns rather than apologising for them. The sex worker's encounters are differentiated with real characterisation: sleek and sinister in the honeytrap setup, the old rake and the young man genuinely swaggering and shy by turn. The jagged pentatonic scales on the mandarin's arrival prickle with the right menace, and the final desperate chase lands with raw-nerved urgency. The LPO is taut throughout — dramatically alert in a way that live recordings sometimes sacrifice for comfort. There's no comfort here, which is exactly right for this music. Bartók wrote both ballets knowing they would disturb, and Gardner doesn't soften that. The honest caveat: if you already own Boulez's Mandarin, you're not getting a replacement — you're getting a complement, and a very good one. What you're gaining is the Prince at full theatrical weight, which is something the Boulez never quite offers. That alone justifies the release.
