Berlioz Carnevale Romano

"This very fine account…features the most starry casts of soloists, all at their peak, and is strongly directed by James Levine. Jessye Norman is magnetic…Domingo is at his most heroic in both halves of the massive narrative… an obvious principal DVD recommendation for the foreseeable future.” - The Penguin Classical Guide

This live recording was made at the Royal Albert Hall during one of London’s famous Promenade Concert seasons. Sir Georg Solti conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a magnifi cent performance of Berlioz’s concert cantata La Damnation de Faust. This feast of Berlioz launched Solti’s farewell tour with the orchestra he had directed for twenty years and was described by The Times as “the unsurpassable culmination of two decades of music-making…one that summarised all that has been most admirable about Solti’s long reign in Chicago.”

Berlioz, the passionate, ardent, irrepressible genius of French Romanticism, left a rich and original oeuvre which exerted a profound influence on 19th century music. Berlioz developed a profound affinity toward music and literature as a child. Sent to Paris at 17 to study medicine, he was enchanted by Gluck's operas, firmly deciding to become a composer.

…There are some thrilling moments in a well-paced interpretation, it’s Colin Davis who takes top honours with a brilliant account of Harold in Italy, probably Berlioz at his most eccentric in those sudden outbursts - something he started back in 1830 with the Symphonie fantastique, and there are many points in the first movement when one could seamlessly pass into that work. The fine violist Nobuko Imai is a wistful Harold.

Masters of Classical Music is an informative and captivating guide to twenty of the most important works in music history. Outtakes from the original scores within the documentaries, assist the viewer by making it easier to follow the music and to overall comprehend the structure of the works. The viewer will travel back in time to experience the birth places of these compositions and will thereby gain insight into the lives of the composers whilst receiving a thorough introduction to the works.

This imaginative staging of Berlioz's dramatic symphony for chorus, soloists and orchestra relies heavily on the moving of massed choirs across a large stage. It has vivid lighting effects–rather too many of them using strobes–and monolithic multi-purpose sets, in particular a revolving glass drum which functions both as cinema screen and rostrum for singers, so that the final ride to Hell, for example, is sung by Mephistopheles and Faust above a cavalcade of projected horses, like the inside of a zoetrope. The three main soloists have voices on a scale that can compete with these flashy production values–White and Kasarova, in particular, sing at a level of intensity that would swamp anything less; the climactic seduction trio has rarely been sung so well or with such an overpoweringly polymorphous eroticism. Cambreling marshals his forces effectively, giving full rein to the work's showstoppers like the "Hungarian March" but not neglecting the subtler less kinetic Gluckian side of Berlioz's vocal writing. (Roz Kaveney)

There are some works which seem to be suspended in their time. La Damnation de Faust is a visionary project which took decades to become known as a chef-d’oeuvre, firstly in the rest of Europe and then in France, but posthumously. Today it is an emblematic work, built up of anthological pieces fro orchestra and choir and soloists’ aits which remain in our memories. Its interpretation by François-Xavier Roth in concert version enables us to hear this work with force and the audacity of early Berlioz: sombre but brilliant.

Paul McCreesh is one of the leading figures in the movement for historically informed performances, and he established his reputation primarily in Renaissance and Baroque music. Yet he is versatile and noted for his varied interests, and he has delved into the Romantic repertoire for this spectacular 2010 recording with Ensemble Wroclaw of Hector Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts.

"The most dramatic piece that Berlioz ever wrote," is how conductor John Nelson describes La Damnation de Faust. The composer designated this thrilling hybrid of oratorio and opera a 'légende dramatique'. Following in the triumphant footsteps of Les Troyens, also recorded at the Auditorium Erasme in Strasbourg, this performance reunites Nelson and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg with singers Michael Spyres, Joyce DiDonato and Nicolas Courjal.