Berlioz Times 3, in All His Glory

Hector Berlioz is a composer better known by reputation than through his music, the tiniest handful of popular works excepted. In Britain, the native affection for musical pageantry in general and oversized choral works in particular has kept his brilliantly audacious music on the boards, with help from three of the most influential British conductors of the century, Sir Hamilton Harty, Sir Thomas Beecham, and since the latter’s death in 1964, Sir Colin Davis.

There are pockets of interest elsewhere, including a sort of Berlioz tradition in Boston, established between the world wars by a Frenchman, Pierre Monteux, continued by his compatriot and music director of the Boston Symphony in the 1950s, Charles Munch, and revived by the Bostonians’ present music director and a longtime Berlioz supporter, Seiji Ozawa. And there’s the San Diego Symphony. But wait.

France’s interest in its most innovative son is at a low these days, for whatever reasons, with the only French specialist of international standing being Charles Dutoit, who is in fact Swiss, and the leading French orchestra--Dutoit’s--being the Montreal Symphony, which is of course Canadian.

Dutoit and his Montrealers have made what may well be the most important Berlioz recording of our time, a stunningly fine performance of the composer’s most grandiose creation, the epic--in scope, in its demands on its singers (choral as well as solo) and instrumentalists, to say nothing of its producers’ coffers--four-hour opera, “Les Troyens” (London 443 693, four CDs).

The participants, and that includes the magnificent Montreal Symphony Chorus and London’s technical team, fearlessly meet the immense challenges posed by Berlioz’s rendering of incidents of the Trojan War, to his own libretto after Virgil.

London’s only predecessor worth mentioning is the 1970 Philips recording, with Jon Vick ers’ heroic assumption of the central role of Enee (Aeneas) and Colin Davis’ grandly theatrical conducting. Otherwise, it was make-do, with the remainder of the cast not nearly up to the Vickers standard.

Dutoit, leading a generally swifter but no less finely detailed performance, has a strong trio of principals in the Enee of American tenor Gary Lakes, who admirably encompasses the role’s alternating demands of being gentle lover, inspired visionary and ruthless warrior; powerhouse French soprano Francoise Pollet, who thrillingly projects the fevered lyricism of the spurned Didon (Dido); and another American, Deborah Voigt, who portrays the prophetess Cassandre (Cassandra) with conviction and rich resources of tone.

To attempt a detailed description of Berlioz’s blinding vision is hardly worth the effort. Let Dutoit and his forces be the composer’s spokespersons.

The new, made-in-Boston recording of Berlioz’s hardly less overreaching Requiem is up against more competition--quantitatively, at any rate.

Seiji Ozawa has been leading this work for at least three decades and he is clearly its master, emphasizing Berlioz’s somber majesty and the originality of his harmonic language rather than his noise, of which, under any circumstances, there isn’t nearly as much as uninformed criticism--and the immense size of the performing forces--would lead us to believe.

The Boston Symphony brass plays magnificently in the score’s most demanding and darkly evocative passages, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus does its demanding job well.

Vinson Cole copes with the high-lying tenor solos as successfully as any current recorded competitor, but falls well below the standard set by Leopold Simoneau, who delivers the soft, focused, characteristically French head-tones that seem to have vanished from today’s vocal scene.

Simoneau’s contribution is one among many excellences present in the currently unavailable Requiem recorded in 1959 by the Boston Symphony under Munch: one of RCA’s earliest CD transfers. Until its reappearance, Ozawa’s is more than a stopgap, and, it should be noted, the first to be fitted onto a single CD (RCA Victor 62544).

And San Diego? Well, the enterprising Naxos label has signed its first American orchestra--not one of the glamour ensembles, that would hardly be in keeping with Naxos’ budget pricing policy. Rather, they’ve hooked up with the San Diego Symphony, which has made impressive strides under music director Yoav Talmi.

The first release in what Naxos promises will be nothing less than the complete orchestral works of Berlioz--all to be recorded by Talmi and his San Diegans--has appeared: a well-packed CD (550999) containing seven of the composer’s overtures, the familiar ones, including of course “Roman Carnival,” but, more importantly, such rarities as “Waverley,” “Rob Roy” and “King Lear,” the last a splendidly lush lump of lyric brooding that hardly deserves its neglect.

These are hearty, big-boned readings, more concerned with dramatic sweep than telling detail. Which isn’t to say that elegance is altogether lacking, e.g., the lovely sound of the massed cellos (how sensitively Berlioz always writes for them!) at the start of “Waverley,” and the handsome projection by the orchestra’s principals of the lustrous solos for oboe and English horn elsewhere.

A winning start to a laudable project and, one hopes, symbolic of an end to the San Diego Symphony’s chronic financial insecurity.