Music

BBC SSO/Rophe

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

five stars

OVER the weekend, BBC Radio 3 provided a comprehensive portrait of French composer Hector Berlioz, “The Ultimate Romantic”, with performances by all its orchestras and ensembles from across the country, expert commentary on his work, and readings from his memoir and correspondence. Alongside some superb music, a picture quickly emerged of a man who loved the theatre and lived his whole life as drama. But anyone who heard none of that would have learned as much by attending or listening to just the contribution to the schedule by the BBC Scottish from Glasgow.

Sunday afternoon’s programme began, appropriately, with one of the composer’s Sir Walter Scott-inspired overtures, Waverley. A picture of a Romantic hero in a Romantic landscape, it is very painterly in the way it opens with the sketching of a background before the cellos sweep in with the melody, but even when the fiddles get to play the tune later there is nothing that sounds very Scottish. What was abundantly clear was the composer’s early debt to Beethoven.

Its theatricality, however, is nothing compared to the opening of the cantata La Mort de Cleopatra given propulsive direction by conductor Pascal Rophe, and performed with exquisite dynamic clarity by mezzo Karen Cargill. The precision of her volume control in the acoustic of the room commanded attention, both in terms of the music and the character, and her performance of the recitatives hardly required translation.

If that work suggests Berlioz’s obsession with Shakespeare, his Lelio, for orchestra, chorus and three male soloists, makes it explicit in the narration, delivered – in English – with great panache by actor Samuel West. The composer’s autobiographical follow-up to the Symphonie fantastique is a beguiling, if bonkers, beast, the music linked by long passages of literary criticism and self-dramatisation, Shakespearean soliloquy about Shakespeare delivered by West as a strolling player at the front of the platform. The contrasting tenor voices of Andrew Tortise and Sam Furness, and bass-baritone Neal Davies leading the Brigands’ Song, were the other vocal ingredients alongside the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, on very fine form, culminating in the choral (and orchestral) fantasy on The Tempest. A wonderfully committed performance of an utterly unique work.