Berlioz Damnation Gardiner

Gardiner here follows up his previous Philips Berlioz recordings with the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique – the Symphonie fantastique (6/93) and the rediscovered Messe solennelle (4/94) – with a searingly dramatic account of the later programme symphony, Harold in Italy. If anything this performance is even more biting in its impact, with textures transparent yet with plenty of weight, not least in the heavy brass. In a commentary on Berlioz and the conductor – shown recently on television – Gardiner puts as the first two of the conductor’s functions “to set the emotional temperature of the piece” and “to indicate the kaleidoscopic changes of mood that so characterize the music of Berlioz”.

In spite of the French title, and the conductor known for his interest in period performance, this is not the French Orphee et Eurydice of 1774; it is a different 'period version', the period in question being not Gluck's but that of Berlioz (or, as we shall see, nearly so). In 1859, Berlioz, always a passionate admirer of Gluck, prepared a version of the opera for the contralto Pauline Viardot. The alto version of the opera was of course the original Italian one, of 1762, for a castrato, but Berlioz wanted to incorporate some of the changes Gluck had made in 1774 and to use a French text. His compromise version has served as the basis for most revivals of the opera, in whatever language, from then until relatively recent times, though its four-act structure has rarely been followed.

The discovery of any "new" large-scale work by Berlioz is bound to kick up excitement in the music world. So it was in 1992 when the manuscript of the long-lost Solemn Mass, composed in 1824, when Berlioz was 20, was unearthed by a Belgian choirmaster in Antwerp. A scholarly edition was quickly prepared, and John Eliot Gardiner gave the first series of performances in five European cities in 1993. It is from one of those live performances, in London's Westminster Cathedral, that this world-premiere recording derives.

I am familiar with half a dozen recordings of this wonderful seasonal work but invariably return to two favourites. I dismiss Matthew Best's curiously pallid and far too anglicised version and turn to the Inbal recording from 1989,which is tenderly conducted and benefits from two very different but very beautiful voices in John Aler's vibrant Narrator and Stafford Dean's darkly intense Herod but unfortunately Margaret Zimmermann completely lacks the delicacy and nuance that both Anne Sofie von Otter and Janet Baker bring to the Holy Mother, being thick and clumsy of tone with too pronounced a vibrato and very little variety in her expression.

John Eliot Gardiner conducts his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique through two concerts of Berlioz compositions. The 'Symphonie Fantastique' is an orchestral tour de force which is central to the repertoire of every major orchestra. It is performed here on original instruments in its original 1830s orchestration in the atmospheric old hall of the Paris Conservatoire where it was first heard. Also included is the first performance of the newly discovered 'Messe Solennelle' with the Monteverdi choir. Written when Berlioz was just 20 years old, it was thought lost until its rediscovery in 1992. The first performance of this large-scale Mass for 150 years was filmed in London's Westminster Cathedral. Gardiner's period-instrument orchestra gives characteristically idiomatic performances of these seminal works (which are also linked thematically, through Berlioz's extensive re-use of material from the Messe).