You’d think that given the familiarity of Berlioz’s
various overtures, there would be more stereo albums devoted to them. It
doesn’t happen. If you look them up, you’ll find maybe a dozen or so discs
devoted exclusively to the overtures. What most companies do is include a few
Berlioz overtures along with Berlioz’s longer works, the Symphonie fantastique or Harold
in Italy for instance. And, of course, we often get one or two of the
composer’s overtures mixed into collections of other famous overtures. Seems a
little unfair, but it means that this new SACD recording of seven Berlioz
overtures from Sir Andrew Davis and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra doesn’t
have a lot of competition. Not that competition would have diminished the
merits of this outing in any case; Andrew Davis does quite well.
Before we begin, however, I’d like to refute a claim I
read once from a noted music critic who said that all conductors with the name
Davis were boring, meaning Sir Andrew Davis and Sir Colin Davis. That, to me,
is pretty unfair, making a generalization based on...what? Both Sir Andrew and Sir Colin Davis have made
tons of albums (Colin Davis far more and for far longer) and have millions of
fans. No conductor attracts that much positive attention by being boring. I
mention this because certainly there is nothing boring about Andrew Davis’s
handling of the Berlioz overtures on this album, and they are almost as
expressive, emphatic, lyrical, and exciting as Colin Davis’s RCA set. So, take
that, noted critic.
Of the seven overtures on the disc, three of them Berlioz
(1803-1869) wrote as preludes to operas--Les
Francs-juges (1826), Benvenuto
Cellini (1838), and Beatrice et
Benedict (1862)--and four as self-contained concert works--Waverley (1828), Le Roi Lear (1831), Le Carnaval
romain (1844), and Le Corsaire
(1844). The concert overtures are like miniature tone poems, the composer
basing them mostly on literary sources (Sir Walter Scott for Waverley, Shakespeare for King Lear, elements of James Fenimore
Cooper and Lord Byron for Le Corsaire,
and his own Benvenuto Cellini for Le Carnaval romain).
Anyway, the program begins with the fiery Corsaire, which conjures up images of
dashing pirates and sleek pirate ships. Davis maintains a swaggering forward
momentum that seems ideally suited to the swashbuckling music. Contrasted with
the thrills of the Corsaire is the
overture to the comic-opera Beatrice et
Benedict. It is of a lighter, more capricious nature, which Davis delights
in. We see in these works why Berlioz
was so influential in the development of the modern orchestra and modern
orchestration, inspiring later composers like Franz Liszt (Les preludes), Richard Strauss (Don
Juan), Erich Wolfgang Korngold (The
Sea Hawk), and John Williams (Star
Wars). It’s all quite vivid, heroic, and picturesque.
Les Francs-juges
was Berlioz’s first substantial instrumental work, and he was justly proud of
it. It sounds appropriately grim, somber, yet lyrical in Davis’s hands, and the
Bergen Philharmonic seem more than up to the job, playing in rich, strong,
precise accord.
And so it goes. Le Carnaval
romain takes us back to the exhilarating
pace of Le Corsaire, with a little
more lilt in the melodies. Davis handles it in high style. Next, the score for Waverley bears the inscription “Dreams
of love and lady’s charms, Give place to honour and to arms.” Davis does a
commendable job with the work’s opposing ideas and readily points up the
music’s importance to that of later Romantic composers. In Le Roi Lear we get all of Shakespeare’s emotion, turmoil, and
poetry compressed into a few minutes. Davis and his players never overdramatize
the piece, which I appreciated.
The program ends with the overture to Benvenuto Cellini, music I have sometimes found ponderous and
boring in its melodramatic manner. Here, Davis is able to bring out a little
more of its color and variety, ending the set in satisfying fashion.
In 2012 Chandos used Grieghallen, Bergen, Norway, as the
recording venue for this 24-bit/96kHz 2.0/5.0-channel SACD hybrid
surround-sound recording. Like other hybrid SACDs, this one plays back in two
channels on a regular CD player and two or five channels on a Super Audio CD
player. I popped the disc into my Sony SACD player and listened to the
two-channel stereo SACD layer.
The sound I heard was nicely dynamic, with a clean
midrange and more than adequate lows. The sound field is a tad on the forward
side, but not much. It hasn’t quite the warmth, air, or ambience of the Colin
Davis set for RCA, but again it’s close. The clarity and impact of the
recording show themselves most noticeably in things like Les Francs-juges, where the timpani and bass make a case for
themselves.
To hear a brief excerpt from this album, click below:
JJP
JJP
