Berlioz: La Damnation de Faust

Starring: Staatskapelle Berlin, Staatskapelle Dresden, Sylvain Cambreling Original UK Premiere: 1999 Dvd Release: 3rd July, 2000 Number Of Discs: 1 Format: PAL, Widescreen, Region 0 Encoding Subtitled In: Dutch, English, French

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Louis Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer best known for the Symphonie Fantastique, first performed in 1830 & for his Requiem of 1837, with its tremendous resources that include four antiphonal brass choirs. Berlioz was born in France at La Côte St. Andre, between Lyon & Grenoble. His father was a physician & young Hector was sent to Paris to study medicine as well. Berlioz was horrified by the process of dissection and, to the surprise of his parents, he abandoned his career path in medicine to study music. He then attended the Paris Conservatoire studying opera & composition. He became identified early on with the French romantic movement. Among his friends were writers such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo & Honoré de Balzac. Berlioz is said to have been innately romantic, experiencing emotions deeply from early childhood. This manifested itself in his weeping at passages of Virgil as a child & later in a series of love affairs.

This imaginative staging of Berliozs dramatic symphony for chorus, soloists & orchestra relies heavily on the moving of massed choirs across a large stage. It has vivid lighting effects, rather too many of them using strobes, & monolithic multi-purpose sets, in particular a revolving glass drum which functions both as cinema screen & rostrum for singers, so that the final ride to Hell, for example, is sung by Mephistopheles & Faust above a cavalcade of projected horses, like the inside of a zoetrope. The three main soloists have voices on a scale that can compete with these flashy production values, White & Kasarova, in particular, sing at a level of intensity that would swamp anything less; the climactic seduction trio has rarely been sung so well or with such an overpoweringly polymorphous eroticism. Cambreling marshals his forces effectively, giving full rein to the works showstoppers like the Hungarian March but not neglecting the subtler less kinetic Gluckian side of Berliozs vocal writing. The DVD has subtitles in English, German & Dutch, & menus in those languages, as well as French, Italian, Spanish & Swedish.

The Dresden Staatskapelle is an orchestra based in Dresden. It was founded in 1548, which makes it one the oldest orchestras in the world. The orchestra has had many eminent chief conductors. In its early years, Heinrich Schütz was associated with it & in the 19th century Carl Maria von Weber & Richard Wagner were both chief conductors. In the 20th century, Richard Strauss became closely associated with it, as both a conductor & a composer, with several of his works being premiered by the ensemble. Karl Bohm & Rudolf Kempe were also chief conductors. Herbert Blomstedt has been musical director of the Dresden Staatskapelle from 1975 to 1985. With them he recorded a complete cycle of Beethoven s nine symphonies. Giuseppe Sinopoli was its chief conductor at the time of his death in 2001. In August 2002, Bernard Haitink took up the post.

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