Word: berlioz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Berlioz: La Damnation de Faust, with Nicolai Gedda, Jules Bastin, Josephine Veasey (London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Colin Davis conducting; Philips; 3 LPs; $20.94). This work exists on one of the composer's loftier plateaus of the mind rather than on a workable theatrical level. Thus Damnation is in many ways especially well suited to armchair listening. Continuing his masterly unprecedented series devoted to Berlioz's major works, Davis again conducts with suave professionalism and lightning-like flashes of insight and revelation...
...have just completed the poem and score of Les Troyens, an opera in five acts," wrote Hector Berlioz in his memoirs in 1858. "What is to become of this immense work?" There was enough realism in Berlioz's idealistic nature for him to know full well that the fate of Les Troyens lay, in more ways than one, in the hands of the gods. Little did he know that they would decree a century of neglect...
...text of Les Troyens was drawn from Virgil's Aeneid by Berlioz himself. It is an Iliadic arch that spans the siege of Troy, the death of the Trojan women and Aeneas' departure to establish Rome. Indisputably the most epic of all grand operas, it has not yet achieved the popularity of Boris Godunov or Otello, but it is on its way. Britain's Covent Garden has successfully done it twice. The earlier English production, in 1957, was the first full staging in a single evening that even approximated the composer's original intentions. (Berlioz broke...
...Troyens' music is at once delicately concentrated and surcharged with an agitato inner flame. It is as short-winded as Mozart and as elongated as Wagner; rarely does Berlioz repeat himself, yet he spins out one duet (Cassandra and her lover Coroebus) for 15 minutes. Never a piker in such matters, Berlioz made heroic stage demands that included hunters on horseback, ships sailing out of a harbor, a stream that turns into a "roaring waterfall" and, of course, a large wooden horse...
...production, conceived by Stage Director Nathaniel Merrill and executed by Set Designer Peter Wexler, has its curious faults. For example, Merrill has unaccountably confined Dido and Aeneas to a bedchamber when they should be strolling under the stars while singing Berlioz's interpolation of "In such a night as this" from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. In most other respects, the production is a visual extravaganza that at long last brings the Met fully into the 20th century. Rear slides and film vivify all the big moments, from the fall of Troy to the lovers' amorous romp...