One sometimes wonders what is the point of producing video productions of
live concerts for home viewers, when the visual element adds nothing to the
actual experience of the music. That is certainly not the case with the
Berlioz
Symphonie fantastique, where the dramatic content of the
music actually cries out for an aspect that engages the eyes as well as the
ears. Mariss Jansons is fully alert to the histrionic dimensions of the
music, and we are shown the offstage oboe placed high in the basilica during
the
Schne aux champs, as well as the two harps stereophonically
positioned at the front of the stage in the second movement
Ball,
where Jansons does not employ Berliozs later cornet additions. He also
gives Berliozs often pioneering orchestral colours their full measure; the
piccolo clarinet in the final movement has a screeching quality that is far
removed from any suspicion of Karajan smoothness. We are even given the
strings playing
sul ponticello - in a dubious nineteenth century
tradition - towards the end of the same movement. However a step backwards
from Karajan is taken in the treatment of the bells, when the older
conductor pioneered the use of electronic synthesisers in his later
recording with the Berlin Philharmonic. Here we are given two very
impressive-looking real bells, but despite their appearance they are at
least an octave too high, sounding out above the plainchant in the tubas
instead of providing the sinister underpinning that was clearly Berliozs
intention. The woodwind make a valiant effort to provide the
glissandi which Berlioz requested at the opening of the same
movement, but the effect is difficult to fake with modern instruments.
Berlioz originally wrote for flutes and oboes without the elaborate keys
nowadays employed. Jansons earns a black mark for omitting the marked repeat
in the
March to the scaffold, which leaves that movement distinctly
shorter than the others and unbalances the proportions of the work. Even
more unforgivably he similarly eliminates the repeat in the first movement,
which not only deprives the
idie fixe of the opportunity to
establish itself but also removes the brief bridging passage which Berlioz
wrote to lead back to the recapitulation.
In the opening Haydn
Surprise Symphony we are given, despite a
reduction in the number of strings, essentially big-band Haydn in the
nineteenth century style. The positioning of the brass on a high podium
behind the strings and woodwind means that they sometimes dominate the sound
unduly. Nevertheless everything remains clear and poised, with plenty of
light and shade in the manner of the playing that often defeats present-day
period bands.
In the Mozart second flute concerto - the music is the same as the oboe
concerto - Emmanuel Pahud is perfection: light, supple and beautifully
inflected. The sound is helped by the resonant acoustic, a Byzantine
basilica which provides a halo of sound around the instruments. Like many
other Byzantine churches it has been converted into a mosque.
This is a concert one would be delighted to encounter in the concert hall,
superbly played and conducted throughout. At the same time I recall a
concert I
reviewed with pleasure for the
Seen and Heard section of this site as recently as January of this
year, when the Welsh National Opera Orchestra gave a performance of the
Berlioz which not only gave us the score complete with the repeats that the
composer indicated, but also made considerably more capital out of the
unusual effects that he incorporated. By comparison with that performance,
Jansons is just too polished and too polite. Is this Istanbul event a
concert, by contrast, that one would want to listen to more than a few
times? I rather doubt it. The extras two German language documentaries
(with subtitles) with elements of a travelogue add nothing of substance.
Oddly the brief interview in English with Mariss Jansons is subtitled in
that language with words different from those he actually employs. The brief
booklet note by Tobias Mvller tells us nothing about the music either.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Masterwork Index: Symphonie fantastique
~~ Haydn symphony
94
