condition (record/cover): NM / NM - Gatefold sleeve. Insert included. Charles Chaynes studied with Darius Milhaud and won the Prix de Rome, credentials suggesting cautious academicism. Erzsebet on Harmonia Mundi refutes the assumption: the opera confronts Erzsébet Báthory, the "Blood Countess" of Transylvanian legend, with means that concede nothing to the picturesque.
The subject had attracted surrealism, horror cinema, gothic literature. Chaynes treats it without macabre complacency, interested instead in the psychology of absolute power, the solitude of one who can do anything. The orchestra doesn't illustrate; it excavates. Harmonia Mundi's release documents a composer capable of facing darkness without being seduced by it, finding in this gruesome material something uncomfortably human.
