Berlioz: Of Madness and Love (2015)

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Berlioz: Of Madness and Love (2015)

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"My life is a novel which interests me very much", Hector Berlioz allegedly once said to a friend. For this reason, in 1848 – at the age of 45 – he began writing his memoires. When the work was published posthumously in 1870 the public was astonished by the candour and literary prowess with which Berlioz described the course of his life.

Vesselina Kasarova was born in Stara Zagora (Bulgaria) and began playing the piano at the age of four. After training as a concert pianist and gaining her diploma, she studied singing with Ressa Koleva at the Music Academy of Sofia, and was already, as a student, singing major roles at the National Opera. She has given concerts and recitals throughout Europe, the USA and Japan. Vesselina Kasarova holds the title Kammersängerin of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich as well as of the Vienna State Opera.

Ivor Bolton is chief conductor of the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg, with whom he has appeared annually at the Salzburg Festival since 2000, and on tour (including at the 2006 BBC Proms in London), and with whom he has already built up an extensive discography, including a critically successful series of Bruckner Symphony recordings. He takes up the position of Music Director of the Teatro Real Madrid in September 2015 and is also Chief Conductor of the Dresden Festival Orchestra.

The Sinfonieorchester Basel is one of the oldest and most important orchestras in Switzerland. It is rooted in the north-west of Switzerland but enjoys a regional as well as international prominence. The Sinfonieorchester Basel is renowned for the consistent quality of its performances.

Composer: Hector Berlioz
Performer: Soyoung Yoon, Vesselina Kasarova
Conductor: Ivor Bolton
Orchestra/Ensemble: Basel Symphony Orchestra

Reviews: Fine though much of it is, Ivor Bolton’s new album for the Sinfonieorchester Basel’s own label doesn’t live up to its name. It aims to examine Shakespeare’s influence on Berlioz, a vast subject that ideally needs a retrospective rather than a single disc to do it justice. Only two of the four works included here, however – the overture Le Roi Lear and the Scène d’amour from Roméo et Juliette – take Shakespeare as direct inspiration. The Rêverie et Caprice for violin and orchestra reworks material originally jettisoned from the opera Benvenuto Cellini, though its stylistic similarities to the Roméo extract are telling and certainly warrant the juxtaposition. The cantata La Mort de Cléopâtre shares its subject with Antony and Cleopatra, though the text, a neoclassical effort by Pierre-Ange Viellard, is closer to Racine than Shakespeare in style and tone.

La Mort de Cléopâtre comes last on the disc and is also its weak link, which is the responsibility neither of Bolton nor his orchestra. He’s an admirable Berliozian, wonderfully alert to the mix of classical precision and Romantic intensity that makes this music unique. The playing, all dark strings and sculpted woodwind, is superb, too, but Bolton’s decision to deploy period rather than conventional brass makes the orchestral sound disquietingly comfortless rather than opulent. Vesselina Kasarova’s Cléopâtre, however, is a major drawback. It lies too high for her. Fine moments of insight – there’s an extraordinary surge of self-hatred at the memory of Actium – don’t compensate for a bottled quality at the top of the voice, where her intonation also comes adrift on occasion.

The rest of it impresses. South Korean violinist Soyoung Yoon sounds suave in the Rêverie et Caprice. The Roméo et Juliette extract is very adult and sensual, rightly acknowledging that Berlioz’s lovers are older and more knowing than their Shakespearean counterparts. Le Roi Lear, one of the few works to find a musical language appropriate to the play, is gaunt, titanic and thrillingly done. It’s well worth hearing, but the replacement of Cléopâtre with another work – the Tempest Fantasia from Lélio, for instance – would have been preferable.