Berlioz Roméo et Juliette
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Hector Berlioz
Label: Philips
Magazine Review Date: 3/1998
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 136
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 454 454-2PH2
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Roméo et Juliette |
Hector Berlioz, Composer
Catherine Robbin, Mezzo soprano Gilles Cachemaille, Baritone Hector Berlioz, Composer Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, Tenor John Eliot Gardiner, Conductor Monteverdi Choir Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique |
Author: John Warrack
No composer has ever been so deeply devoted to Shakespeare, nor understood him so creatively, as Berlioz. Accepting the challenge to musical history made by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and riding on the tide of the young French romantic writers’ battles to loosen classical dramatic conventions, he composed in Romeo et Juliette a work that embodies the play in a novel symphonic form. He did not thereby make matters easy for his interpreters, and every conductor must solve in his own way the structural problem of holding together a great but problematic work, especially of balancing its dramatic and reflective nature. Nor did he at first feel entirely sure of what he had done. He tells us in his Memoirs that the original 1839 performances were different in content from the fifth, in 1846, which was the version he published. As with Shakespeare himself, and indeed with this very play, there were the equivalents of ‘good quartos’ and ‘bad quartos’. What we have in this record, if not exactly a ‘variorum’ edition, is one that adds to the standard version much of the discarded music that has been rescued (often from under collettes, glued-on pieces of paper) and can be found in Appendices III and IV of Vol. 18 of the New Berlioz Edition. Track programming will allow listeners to chart their preferred course through the work, ‘standard’ or so-called ‘original’ or Gardiner’s own mixture of the two.
Briefly, the main differences are as follows. Berlioz expanded the original Prologue so as to bring in more glimpses of music later to be heard. His second idea is the better one, since it alerts the listener to the concept of a mixed media work, combining solo voices, chorus, narration and orchestral description or meditation – the Shakespearian mixed genre, in fact, which so affronted the French classicists and so intoxicated the young romantics. The revised “Queen Mab” Scherzo has a more strongly composed ending (Berlioz himself thought so). But it is excellent to balance the Prologue’s outline of future action by restoring the Second Prologue. This seems not to have been orchestrated, and it is, here, by Oliver Knussen with a quick Berliozian ear (imaginatively using trombones for a low single bass-line at “Le fete de la mort commence”, as a grim echo of the Prince’s original trombone warning to the quarrelling Montagues and Capulets). The finale had the most alterations; they are mostly to do with shortening Friar Laurence’s sermon which, like most sermons, is the better for it. Berlioz admitted he had been carried away into setting too much text.
This often maligned finale is more than justified in Gardiner’s performance. His sense of drama makes the whole long movement a climactic conclusion to the symphony, the strong, clear choral singing crucially drawing the tensions together from shock and remorse into acceptance of tragedy. Gilles Cachemaille’s voice is a little light for Pere Laurence – it is not exactly grave et onctueux, qualities for which Berlioz admired the original singer, Adolphe Alizard – but he has an intelligent perception of the part, and sings with an affecting ruefulness as well as firmness. At the other end of the work, the drama is set forcefully in motion with the hurtling fugato, clear and tense in this performance, driving hard towards the Prince’s intervention (Shakespeare’s “Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace ...”). Gardiner uses original instruments: there is an ophicleide rasp among the trombones Then, the two pages of fugato run down into silence with a chastened numbness. The “Strophes” are attractively sung by Catherine Robbin, a light contralto such as Berlioz would have known (he intended the role for Rosine Stoltz, who had taken her first name from her success as Rossini’s Rosina). Jean-Paul Fouchecourt throws off the difficult Queen Mab Scherzetto with the verve and wit he might bring to a comic opera aria (the original, Alexis Dupont, had a light, operatic voice).
Accompanying the second verse of the “Strophes”, the six cellos play virtually without vibrato. This succeeds, movingly, as an ironically aloof echo to the singer’s impassioned apostrophe to young love soon to be extinguished; but Robbin is probably using more vibrato than singers of the day would have done. The question of how much vibrato would have been used by a Paris orchestra of the time is arguable; Gardiner is almost certainly right to discourage it. Spohr, in his Violinschule of 1832, recommended avoiding the “frequent” use of vibrato “or in improper places”; but he was speaking of soloists. Yet Gardiner also appears to discourage portamento, which was coming in as an expressive device. The Love scene seems a wholly proper place for warming the phrases with, if not vibrato, at least some portamento; and Gardiner’s orchestra loses something of its eloquence by denying these ‘unspoken’ words of love an analogy with the voice. It may partly account for him pressing the music rather hard in consequence, where other conductors, notably Sir Colin Davis, can allow the great rapturous phrases to unfold as if borne on uncontainable human emotion. It is a question of how the music can speak to us today. But Gardiner also presses the “Queen Mab” Scherzo hard, where Davis floats the phrases on the light, speeding tempo. Berlioz added a cross footnote to “Romeo in the Tomb of the Capulets” saying that 99 times out of a 100 the public was too ignorant to deserve this appeal to the imagination: strong on the dramatic nature of this symphonie dramatique, Gardiner gives it a brilliantly eloquent account. His account of the Ball is vigorous, and springs with exuberance, even if it lacks the whiff of foreboding which Davis scents in it.
Romeo survives with varying fortunes in the catalogue, from Toscanini’s odd (and not wholly faithful) account, by way of a plain performance by Gardelli, to one of Dutoit’s better Berlioz records; the reissue of Monteux is an agreeable reminder, that of Munch a less worthy one, of two eminent French Berliozians. No one with a care for Berlioz will want to be without this remarkable new set, splicing together as it does all the different versions (only once does a splice seem audible); and those who choose it will be rewarded with a performance that gives brilliant attention to the more outward dramatic elements. Sir Colin Davis’s recordings, including his most recent (1993), are more devoted to the inward emotions, and touch more eloquently on the tragedy of young love destined never to flourish, but never to fade. There is room for both views of a wonderful work.'
Briefly, the main differences are as follows. Berlioz expanded the original Prologue so as to bring in more glimpses of music later to be heard. His second idea is the better one, since it alerts the listener to the concept of a mixed media work, combining solo voices, chorus, narration and orchestral description or meditation – the Shakespearian mixed genre, in fact, which so affronted the French classicists and so intoxicated the young romantics. The revised “Queen Mab” Scherzo has a more strongly composed ending (Berlioz himself thought so). But it is excellent to balance the Prologue’s outline of future action by restoring the Second Prologue. This seems not to have been orchestrated, and it is, here, by Oliver Knussen with a quick Berliozian ear (imaginatively using trombones for a low single bass-line at “Le fete de la mort commence”, as a grim echo of the Prince’s original trombone warning to the quarrelling Montagues and Capulets). The finale had the most alterations; they are mostly to do with shortening Friar Laurence’s sermon which, like most sermons, is the better for it. Berlioz admitted he had been carried away into setting too much text.
This often maligned finale is more than justified in Gardiner’s performance. His sense of drama makes the whole long movement a climactic conclusion to the symphony, the strong, clear choral singing crucially drawing the tensions together from shock and remorse into acceptance of tragedy. Gilles Cachemaille’s voice is a little light for Pere Laurence – it is not exactly grave et onctueux, qualities for which Berlioz admired the original singer, Adolphe Alizard – but he has an intelligent perception of the part, and sings with an affecting ruefulness as well as firmness. At the other end of the work, the drama is set forcefully in motion with the hurtling fugato, clear and tense in this performance, driving hard towards the Prince’s intervention (Shakespeare’s “Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace ...”). Gardiner uses original instruments: there is an ophicleide rasp among the trombones Then, the two pages of fugato run down into silence with a chastened numbness. The “Strophes” are attractively sung by Catherine Robbin, a light contralto such as Berlioz would have known (he intended the role for Rosine Stoltz, who had taken her first name from her success as Rossini’s Rosina). Jean-Paul Fouchecourt throws off the difficult Queen Mab Scherzetto with the verve and wit he might bring to a comic opera aria (the original, Alexis Dupont, had a light, operatic voice).
Accompanying the second verse of the “Strophes”, the six cellos play virtually without vibrato. This succeeds, movingly, as an ironically aloof echo to the singer’s impassioned apostrophe to young love soon to be extinguished; but Robbin is probably using more vibrato than singers of the day would have done. The question of how much vibrato would have been used by a Paris orchestra of the time is arguable; Gardiner is almost certainly right to discourage it. Spohr, in his Violinschule of 1832, recommended avoiding the “frequent” use of vibrato “or in improper places”; but he was speaking of soloists. Yet Gardiner also appears to discourage portamento, which was coming in as an expressive device. The Love scene seems a wholly proper place for warming the phrases with, if not vibrato, at least some portamento; and Gardiner’s orchestra loses something of its eloquence by denying these ‘unspoken’ words of love an analogy with the voice. It may partly account for him pressing the music rather hard in consequence, where other conductors, notably Sir Colin Davis, can allow the great rapturous phrases to unfold as if borne on uncontainable human emotion. It is a question of how the music can speak to us today. But Gardiner also presses the “Queen Mab” Scherzo hard, where Davis floats the phrases on the light, speeding tempo. Berlioz added a cross footnote to “Romeo in the Tomb of the Capulets” saying that 99 times out of a 100 the public was too ignorant to deserve this appeal to the imagination: strong on the dramatic nature of this symphonie dramatique, Gardiner gives it a brilliantly eloquent account. His account of the Ball is vigorous, and springs with exuberance, even if it lacks the whiff of foreboding which Davis scents in it.
Romeo survives with varying fortunes in the catalogue, from Toscanini’s odd (and not wholly faithful) account, by way of a plain performance by Gardelli, to one of Dutoit’s better Berlioz records; the reissue of Monteux is an agreeable reminder, that of Munch a less worthy one, of two eminent French Berliozians. No one with a care for Berlioz will want to be without this remarkable new set, splicing together as it does all the different versions (only once does a splice seem audible); and those who choose it will be rewarded with a performance that gives brilliant attention to the more outward dramatic elements. Sir Colin Davis’s recordings, including his most recent (1993), are more devoted to the inward emotions, and touch more eloquently on the tragedy of young love destined never to flourish, but never to fade. There is room for both views of a wonderful work.'
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