Hans Werner Henze’s Undine (or Ondine, as Frederick Ashton’s ballet for which it was written is called) is easily his most approachable score, filled with melody, magically delicate evocation and humour. Yet the ballet itself has faded without the dancer who was its inspiration, Margot Fonteyn, and despite Henze’s quarrying of several suites and other extracts from it the score has not caught on in the concert-hall. When the ballet first appeared, in October 1958, the music was dismissed by some critics as an eclectic and derivative mish-mash, and indeed it makes no effort to disguise its indebtedness to, in particular, the neo-classical Stravinsky (the Symphony in Three Movements is briefly but almost literally quoted on more than one occasion). What we have been missing all these years, this enthusiastically committed performance demonstrates, is a score that pays homages to the whole tradition of classical dance and the music written for it, a score whose richness is out of all proportion to the chamber orchestra it uses. That richness ranges from a quite magnificently sonorous evocation of the sea, via the stately wedding music in Act 2, to the deliciously tongue-in-cheek miniature piano concerto (Igor Stravinsky meets Richard Rodgers) that accompanies the quite irrelevant but entertaining divertissement in Act 3. The second divertissement, that is: disastrously for the otherwise poetic scenario about a water-nymph’s fatal love for a human, Ashton insisted on two of them.
But the heart of the ballet is the subtle, quietly iridescent music associated with Ondine herself. Ashton’s ballet was described as a ‘concerto’ for Fonteyn, and much of Henze’s score is a sort of portrait of “the radiant centre of the whole ballet ... this wonder floating, almost, above the ground”, as Henze described her at the time. It is his achievement that the concluding passacaglia, even after those interpolations, is so moving as Ondine, knowing that her kiss will kill her beloved, is nevertheless irresistibly drawn to embrace him. What this wonderfully lucid, skilful and beautiful score needs is what saved Britten’s The Prince of the Pagodas from oblivion: new choreography and a somewhat modified plot. Until then, Knussen’s performance is so good that you can almost imagine a staging for yourself, and it is finely recorded.'