Interesting work, highly overrated recording
MartinP | Nijmegen, The Netherlands | 08/17/2002
(2 out of 5 stars)
"Berlioz remains an intriguing composer and this work shows all his assets to best advantage: his reworking of historical and contemporary influences (more than a few echoes of Beethoven, and Queen Mab is simply Mendelssohn on a laudanum trip), as well as his courageous visions of the future. There's proto-Wagner here, and proto-Mahler; the ominous brass progressions disrupting the Capulet festivities are positively Ivesian; and you don't even need much fantasy to perceive a glimpse of Philip Glass at the end of Juliette's cortège. Add to all that some rhythmic complexities of the Stravinskian kind plus the red-blooded emotional fervour so characteristic of Berlioz, and you have a work that will not easily have you bored. It may be melodramatic and over the top at times, but it's never less than fascinating. This recording of it was greeted with great critical acclaim on its appearance. I heard it at the time and was sorely disappointed. A recent second try didn't change that, I'm afraid. Though the booklet mentions nothing of the kind, this recording was clearly made at a public concert. The coughing starts almost before the music, and returns persistently every ten bars or so for at least 20 minutes. Then the audience seems to slowly overcome its afflictions, and attention shifts to the podium, where players noisily turn their pages, chairs form a percussion section of their own, and Sir Colin leisurely hums along with the music. And there are still more blessings of live recording to be savoured: the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic on an off day for instance. The ensemble is sloppy beyond belief at times: violas lazily out of sync with first violins, pizzicati so randomly timed that they occasionally become almost indistinguishable from all the background noise (as at the end of the Invocation). Intonation is equally approximate - if you didn't know, you would never guess that these sounds came from such a venerable source! The best part of the recording probably are the voices, both choral and solo. Though the small chorus provides some disappointingly rough edges to 'le ciel' at the end of the 'Strophes', in general the singing is incisive, well articulated and powerful where needed. Technically, the recording is very opaque: a great deal of orchestral detail goes unnoticed, turning the wonderful Scène d'amour into a unhealthily mushy affair. The sound has no bloom; it is either vague and distanced, making it doubly vulnerable to external noise, or it is strident and fierce.
I've never understood the logic of live recordings from any other than an economical perspective. The excitement of being at a real performance can by definition not be reproduced on disc, and it is that thrill of the moment that makes you put up with noisy neighbours or weird acoustics because your seat is in the wrong corner of the hall. Extraneous intrusions have no place on a CD; on repeated hearing you start to experience them as part of the score (I've come to expect a loud 'Bravo!' on the final chord of the Hungarian March from Berlioz' Faust, simply because a single enthusiast could not contain himself during Gardiner's live recording of that work, and the editors didn't bother to cut his contribution out). The great thing about CD is that it does offer the possibility of hearing a pristine rendering of a score, adding in precision and sound quality, even objectivity, whatever it may possibly loose in heat of the moment excitement - although in my experience there are rather a lot of studio recording that lack nothing at all in the way of inspiration and musical fervour. So I will be looking for a good studio recording of Berlioz' dramatic symphony, and if you are interested in the work, I strongly suggest you do the same!"
Couldn't disagree more
Andrew | 08/20/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)
"...with the only other reviewer here. The Amazon editorial reviews are more reliable. Speaking personally, although I don't look for technical perfection of ensemble and execution in a recording, even if I did there wouldn't be that much here to worry me - I simply don't know what the other reviewer is talking about in this regard. The precision and expressiveness of the chorus in particular is simply awesome, and the VPO is definitely not having an off day here. Live, schmive - if you want to sit and count the coughs, you can do it, but you have to listen out for them (they're pretty faint) and there's some fabulous music making going on at the same time, which to me is rather more interesting.
More importantly, this is Berlioz for goodness' sake! It needs to have its socks played off, and to heck with the consequences. It's a tricky piece, and it's not often that one hears it performed with such intense commitment to every phrase as one does here - certainly not on Davis's newest (LSO Live) recording, which is, yes, more accurately played than this one but is dull as dishwater. Davis and the VPO even make the finale sound convincing, when it usually sounds simply loud.
Trust me - this one's good."
Track Listings (9) - Disc #1