Beethoven
Christus am Ölberge, Op. 85
Collegium Vocale Gent; Orchestre des Champs-Élysées/Philippe Herreweghe Phi LPH039 47:35 mins
This is one of Beethoven’s least-performed works, and listening to it again after many years I’m not surprised. Indeed, checking out the rivals to this recording I was amazed to find that there are at least a dozen others, some of them with distinguished soloists.
It was written in the middle of Beethoven’s career, when he realised that his hearing was irremediably deteriorating, and much of the music is anguished and even desperate. However, like some of Beethoven’s other anguished and despairing music, it has an element of contrivance. Listen to Florestan’s great aria in Fidelio and you hear how convincingly Beethoven could convey hopelessness, but in this work there is a kind of imitation of that. Everything about this piece suggests smoothness and contrivance, and it is hardly a critique of the performance to say that the three quarters of an hour it lasts – at reasonable tempos – seem much longer than that, because there is a uniformity to the texture which fails to distinguish among hope, anguish, despair and aggression. But evidently, from the list of recordings, plenty of people feel differently. Michael Tanner
PERFORMANCE
RECORDING
Berlioz
Les nuits d’été; Harold en Italie
Michael Spyres (tenor), Timothy Ridout (viola); Strasbourg Philharmonic/John Nelson Erato 5419719685 72:39 mins
This is special. Two extraordinary masterpieces. Two unusual solo parts that are all the more challenging for eschewing showiness. Two outstanding soloists thoroughly immersed in Berlioz’s music, partnered by an orchestra and conductor with an unsurpassed pedigree in the composer.
This latest instalment of John Nelson’s Berlioz series brings together the pioneering orchestral song cycle and the storytelling viola concerto . The latter utterly confounded Paganini’s expectations of virtuosic fireworks, but it finds a supreme advocate in Timothy Ridout. Rarely has
