This is the second time in forty years that Sir Colin Davis (b. 1927) has recorded concert versions of Hector Berlioz’s (1803-1869) Benvenuto Cellini. The present recording stems from two live concert performances on June 26 and 29, 2007 at the Barbican Centre, London, UK, while the previous version was captured in 1969 as a studio performance. Nevertheless, I own a prerecorded 4 track tape (Philips PHI W 43038) of the latter and will be using it for comparison purposes whenever possible. The score used for the two performances differ in many ways but they still have much in common although the order of the set scenes after the overture is not the same. The accompanying booklet to the present edition is in English, French and German while the opera’s libretto is in French and English only.
To begin with, in general, in my experience most of Berlioz’s music performed these days exhibits a rather tranquil, calmer, solemn and rather sugar-coated music not much in tone with his real life provocateur’s character. Up until the mid 1970s Berlioz’s music was performed quite differently in an “impetuous-Romantic” style by the likes of Toscanini, Markevitch, Munch and Martinon for example, as well as Davis. The latter in this 2007 live recording seems to have taken the approach that making new music (and this one is different than the 1969 version, I assure you) leads to a better understanding of Berlioz.
In the new version Sir Colin, for example, delivers a very smooth and lyric overture in a colorless Romantic-dry style while in the 1969 version the music had no overt intrusive personality, it just played for itself full of heroic Romantic fervor, brashness and passion. While in 1969 Davis did not cover up the many weakness of Cellini’s orchestration, he was able to overcome and even bring out those weaknesses and even accentuate them as well, that new colors were introduced to our ears. Cellini is an opera loaded with contrasted scenes which call for set songs, speech songs, colorful orchestral developments for the so-called “movement-music”, music-drama of the serious and giocoso kind, and all of it with few explanatory recitatives – this is an opera eminently based on set-music melody, a Berlioz trademark.
That calls for utterly creative music and music setting which must resort to melodic rhythms to enhance the listener’s perception of the scene and/or dramatic action as in the interlude of D2-Track 6 and/or the beginning of D2-Track 10, for example. In the new disc the music progresses and builds up to the final crisis in a languid way, while in the 1969 version the dramatic context of the same segment is a conflation of nervous, combative and ecstatic symphonic and vocal elements, and this just to name only two of the many segments that Davis sought to attack in different ways – his declarations of melody, harmonic nuances and orchestral virtuosity are not as evident when compared with the 1969 version.
The 2007 disc offers us a languid performance by all with an accentuated tranquil, albeit elegant, but dry Romantic tone that can not overtly stand what is now a “bawd” bland comedy. It has some implosive power while limping along and gets barely to the end with a more than even mood in a studied and deliberate manner for a suave lyricism – totally the opposite of the old “heroic” version. On this new version the singing is nothing to scream about; the tenor, Gregory Kunde (Cellini), a French singer, is quite good but at times his voice just wobbles while Laura Claycomb’s (soprano – Teresa) French diction is very poor and makes everything sound the same. The rest of the singers and chorus, are barely acceptable in my opinion – a far cry from the old version.
The old version’s orchestral and vocal ensemble achieved a daring nervous intensity and expressed well Berlioz’s impetuous Romantic fervor with highly charged brashness on top of an underlying “neurosis” given by a forward in-your-face performance, well-noted for its overt explosive power and gripping atmosphere. Its tension-filled mode moved forward urgently for what could be said was a compulsive reading.
The new 2007 version seems to be deliberately elegant and learned as well as smooth but ends up rather boring, while the SACD surround sound is not helped at all by the dry acoustics of the Barbican Centre. If nothing else the new version is still artistically serviceable, but I like much better the artistry and analog sound of the 1969 version which showed a brash Davis behaving much like “The Screaming Skull” Solti – it’s your pick though!
— John Nemaric
