Berlioz Overtures – Sir Andrew Davis

Berlioz never wrote an ugly bar of orchestration in his life, and this new collection from Bergen makes the case with a persistence that borders on the missionary. Sir Andrew Davis, who has been quietly amassing one of the more distinguished conducting careers of his generation without ever quite getting the celebrity he deserves, treats these seven overtures not as curtain-raisers but as a connected argument about what Berlioz was — a composer who thought in color the way Delacroix thought in color, instinctively, structurally, with no interest in apologizing for it.

I confess I went into this disc with some skepticism about the orchestra. Norwegian ensembles can sound wonderful in Grieg and curiously provincial in the French repertoire, all correct entries and not much danger. Not here. The strings have sheen without glassiness, the brass bite without blare, and somebody, Davis surely, has taught the winds to listen to each other in a way that turns Béatrice et Bénédict into a conversation rather than a recitation. That overture, drawn from the late comic opera Berlioz loved best among his own works, needs exactly this kind of chamber-music intimacy blown up to orchestral scale. Get the balance wrong and it curdles into fussiness. Davis doesn’t get it wrong.

Le Corsaire opens the program at a full gallop, rightly so, since Berlioz himself revised it obsessively, chasing precisely this kind of headlong momentum across three different versions before he was satisfied. The Bergen violins dig into the triplet figuration with real grip, and the woodwind punctuation has the salt-spray tang the title demands. Nothing here rivals the visceral snap of Charles Munch’s old RCA account, still a demon after all these decades. But the comparison isn’t embarrassing, which in this repertoire is saying something.

The revelation is Les Francs-juges, a piece too often dismissed as juvenilia. It comes from 1826, when Berlioz was still finding his feet and had not yet abandoned the abortive opera it was meant to introduce. Davis takes the darkness seriously. The lower strings acquire an almost Beethovenian weight in the introduction, brooding and unsettled, and when the allegro breaks loose it does so with a wildness that reminds you this is essentially the same harmonic imagination that would later produce the Symphonie fantastique‘s march to the scaffold. You hear the seams, the youthful over-reaching, a modulation that doesn’t quite know where it’s going. But that’s precisely the point. This is a composer discovering, in real time, that the rules don’t apply to him.

Le Carnaval romain gets a rendition of tremendous energy that falls just shy of greatness, if I’m honest. The cor anglais solo, one of Berlioz’s loveliest inspirations, lifted bodily from Benvenuto Cellini, the opera that inspired the overture in the first place, is played with real tenderness, dark-grained and unhurried. But the closing pages, for all their brilliance, lack that last increment of abandon that Munch and later Sir Colin Davis brought to the coda. You want the tambourine and the strings to feel dangerous, on the edge of chaos, and here they’re merely superb.

Waverley is a charming underdog of a piece, based on Scott’s novel, structurally a bit naive, and the Bergeners play it as if they know it’s the runt of the litter and love it all the more for that. Good instinct.

Which brings us to Le Roi Lear, the disc’s real achievement. The slow introduction, that long, unaccompanied oboe line stretching over hushed strings, is where you discover whether a director understands Berlioz’s peculiar sense of time, his willingness to let silence do dramatic work. Davis lets it breathe without letting it sag, and the tragic weight accumulates rather than announcing itself. Fifteen minutes is a long haul for an overture, and few conductors sustain the tension. This one does.

Not everything here surpasses the old Colin Davis benchmark recordings. Nothing quite does, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But this is playing of real intelligence and evident joy, handsomely engineered, and a genuine contender. Recommended, without reservation.