Berlioz Overtures by Davis and Bergen Philharmonic

Berlioz was never quite at home in his own century. That’s the paradox you keep bumping up against when you live with this music long enough — the man who practically invented the modern orchestra, who heard colors and textures no one around him could fully grasp, somehow remained a prophet without a comfortable country. His overtures are the place to test this. They’re not curtain-raisers in any conventional sense. They’re arguments, manifestos, dispatches from a sensibility that was perpetually at war with the ordinary.

Sir Andrew Davis and the Bergen Philharmonic have made a handsome case for all of this on a new Chandos release, and the news is mostly good.

Le Corsaire opens the program at a full gallop, and Davis doesn’t flinch — the Bergen strings have real snap, the horns carry weight without thickness, and the whole thing moves with the kind of rhythmic élan that Berlioz’s writing demands but doesn’t always get. Yet Davis is smart enough to know where to pull back. The slower music that arrives early on — Berlioz’s structural signature, the lyric island inside the storm — is handled with genuine feeling rather than mere courtesy. This is harder than it sounds. A lot of conductors treat those passages as speed bumps. Davis treats them as revelations.

The Béatrice et Bénédict overture is, I’ve always thought, among the most underrated things Berlioz ever wrote. The opera itself is a late miracle — that autumn lightness, the Shakespearean wit turned into something almost Mozartean in transparency — and the overture captures both moods at once. The music associated with Béatrice herself arrives quietly, and Davis gives it room to breathe, to carry its emotional weight. What follows — the quick, dancing sections — has real gaiety. The Bergen players seem genuinely delighted by it, which you can hear.

Les Francs-juges is another matter, and this is where the comparison that inevitably haunts this disc becomes pointed.

Anyone who has heard Sir Colin Davis’s Dresden recording of this overture — and if you haven’t, remedy that immediately — knows what the brass section of the Staatskapelle can do with Berlioz’s darkest pages. There is a passage roughly midway through where a long, anguished wind melody unspools over restless strings, and then the percussion moves underneath it like something subterranean and threatening. It is Berlioz at his most cinematically prescient, predating Hitchcock by a century and a quarter. The Bergen interpretation captures the atmosphere — the opening is genuinely ominous — but the strings’ cross-rhythms against the wind lines lack the jagged, almost torn quality they have in Dresden, and that matters. The menace needs those rough edges. Without them, the episode is impressive rather than chilling.

This is not a criticism of the Bergen Philharmonic, which is a fine orchestra that has grown considerably in depth and confidence over the past decade. It’s a question of what a great orchestra with a particular sonic tradition — especially that Dresden brass sound, which is darker and more burnished than virtually anything comparable — brings to music that was written, in a sense, for exactly such resources.

Davis — Sir Andrew, to be precise, since we are in Berlioz territory and the name carries a double valence — conducts without mannerism. That’s rarer than it should be. He doesn’t impose himself on Berlioz so much as serve him, which is the right instinct, though occasionally one wishes for a slightly more personal imprint. Sir Colin, at his best, had the quality of seeming to have discovered this music in the moment, as if no one had ever played it before. Sir Andrew’s Berlioz is deeply considered and consistently musical. Those are genuine virtues.

Chandos has given the orchestra a album that is spacious and detailed without being clinical. Hugh Macdonald’s notes are, as usual, worth reading carefully.

As a collection, this sits comfortably near the top of the field — not quite displacing the great Davis-Dresden account in Les Francs-juges, but fully competitive in Le Corsaire and actually exhilarating in Béatrice et Bénédict. For anyone building a Berlioz library, it belongs there.