The Bournemouth Symphony's self-styled Bartok festival centres on a pair of concerts in which Marin Alsop is conducting two of his stage works: she begins with a rare performance of his first ballet, The Wooden Prince; a semi-staging of the one-act Bluebeard's Castle will close the series.

Composed between 1914 and 1916, and orchestrated the following year, The Wooden Prince is very much a transitional work in Bartok's output, with influences from early Stravinsky, Petrushka especially, sitting awkwardly alongside folk-derived material and the vestiges of Straussian romanticism. The scenario is a strange one, too - a prince fails to gain the affections of a neighbouring princess, so erects a wooden replica of himself to attract her attention - and the 55-minute score sometimes struggles to sustain what drama there is. But the dry, edgy music for the wooden prince himself is striking, and so are the hymn-like celebrations of the natural world, which recall the more sumptuous moments of Bluebeard's Castle.

Alsop's performance had clearly been well prepared, and the orchestral playing was even more assured than it had been beforehand in the Four Orchestral Pieces Op 12, where Alsop's approach also tended to blunt some of the more expressionist edges. But the decision to invite a film-maker, Peter Lee, to provide a visual accompaniment to the ballet rather misfired. Lee's film, involving three dancers and lots of leafy location shots, just added another, sometimes contradictory, strand to a story that is never told that clearly in Bartok's music anyway. Rather than making things easier for an audience that may not have been familiar with the work, it can only have had the opposite effect.

· The BSO play Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle tonight. Box office: 08700 668701.