Even now, when period performances of much of the 19th-century orchestral repertoire are almost commonplace, discs of Berlioz’s works recorded on the instruments for which they were composed are relatively uncommon. Despite the pioneering work of Roger Norrington and John Eliot Gardner in the 1980s, historically informed versions of even Berlioz’s best-known score, the Symphonie Fantastique, can still be counted on one hand. One of those is a 2010 version from François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles. The group returns to Berlioz to mark the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death with recordings of two works that have received even less attention from historical specialists. There appears to have been just one previous period performance on disc of the song cycle Les Nuits d’Été (by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson with the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque) and none at all of the symphony with solo viola, Harold in Italy.
Roth’s version of the Symphonie Fantastique demonstrated how Berlioz’s always vivid orchestration seems even more piquant and transparent when realised by the forces for which it was conceived, and that is equally true of both works here. Les Siècles use woodwind and brass instruments from the middle decades of the 19th century, which, combined with the gut strings, create busy, buoyant textures over which Tabea Zimmermann’s solo viola can soar with ease, though there is no lack of tonal weight when the orchestra takes centre stage, as it does increasingly through the course of the work. The balance between soloist and orchestra is equally convincing in the song cycle, which uses much more modest forces. Though Les Nuits d’Été is most commonly heard nowadays with either a soprano or a mezzo singing Théophile Gautier’s texts, Roth opts for a baritone, the superbly intelligent and light-toned Stéphane Degout, whose delivery of these songs is impeccable.
Also out this week
There’s some of Norrington and Eliot Gardiner’s period-instrument Berlioz in Warner Classics’ Berlioz: The Complete Works. It’s a 27-disc compilation along the lines of the same company’s Debussy edition a year ago, which, to be as comprehensive as possible, includes a real mixture of previously released material. It’s well documented and elegantly packaged, though no texts and translation are included. There are no real duds among the performances either, though only a handful – John Nelson’s recent version of Les Troyens, John Eliot Gardiner’s Opéra de Lyon account of L’Enfance du Christ, Janet Baker’s Nuits d’Été and Véronique Gens’ La Mort de Cléopatre most obviously – are likely to figure on shortlists of best-available versions.
