With an asp clasped in her grasp
London
Royal Festival Hall
11/15/00 -
Hector Berlioz: Ouverture Le carnaval romain, La mort de
Cléopâtre, Symphonie fantastique
Anne Sofie von Otter (mezzo)
Orchestra of the Age of EnlightenmentSimon Rattle (conductor)
There‘s a lot of Berlioz about in London this year. Colin Davies‘ Berlioz
Odyssey with the London Symphony Orchestra offers a complete survey of the
composer, in generally lush style. This concert by the Orchestra of the Age
of Enlightenment is one of two, conducted by Simon Rattle under the rubric
“Berlioz the innovator”, which aim to provide new insights by the use of
original instruments and orchestral techniques. The OAE is generally as
good as its conductor, and Simon Rattle is scaling new heights these days,
so the performance turned out to be superb in itself as well as offering an
educational contrast with the LSO series for the high minded.
Berlioz of course was a romantic in almost every sense, a consciously
self-creating genius obsessed with the inner life, and with emotional
responses to and engagement with the world. But his music always also has a
strong narrative drive that can get lost in the big sound of a modern,
post-Brahms, orchestra. Rattle and the OAE made a cleaner sound that was
more rhetorical, even conversational at times, but still intense and full
of contrasting textures and colours. The overture Le carnaval
romain, a fairly conventional overture made of ideas recycled from the
Florentine carnaval in Benvenuto Cellini perhaps gained only some
lucidity. But the equally familiar Symphonie fantastique, a series
of drug-induced visions arising from obsessive love, had an apparent
reasonableness and narrative coherence that made the last two movements
truly nightmarish, a sinister but exhilarating March to the scaffold
followed by a horribly vivid Witches’ sabbath. You might well have thought
of Goya, but it was also difficult to miss a kind of classicism in this
performance, not entirely surprising in a work that was originally
conceived as a version of Goethe’s Faust.
La mort de Cléopâtre, which formed the second part of
the concert, is effectively an operatic scena. But again, the potential
excess -- an erotomaniac oriental queen in extremis submitting to her fate
-- was kept under tight control. Anne Sofie von Otter, austerely glamorous
rather than exotic, at times recalled Janet Baker in the intensity of her
tone. She also, though, projected passion in a way which suggests that her
Carmen -- a role Baker famously refused -- could be convincing if not
conventional. The orchestra provided a set of voices in counterpoint to von
Otter’s, which they only rarely overwhelmed as she sang with focus rather
than force.
H.E. Elsom