Hannah Nepil, in the Financial Times, is a new name among concert reviewers. But on the evidence of her review of the recent London performance of the Grande Messe des Morts given by the Philharmonia Orchestra, she really must stop calling Berlioz a noisy composer.
“There’s nothing quite like a deafening requiem,” she asserted, “and few are quite as deafening as Berlioz’s.” Such accusations were made about him so often in the past that I am surprised to see them suddenly reappearing.
The Philharmonia performance, she said, “felt like a siege, with the hapless audience waiting to see where the next attack would come from amid the crossfire.”
Berlioz, she added, once declared that if he were threatened with the destruction of all his works save one, he would crave mercy for the Messe des Morts. “This piece,” she remarked, “needs no mercy; it would sooner destroy than be destroyed.”
Yet the point about Berlioz’s Requiem is not how loud it is, but how ravishingly quiet so much of it turns out to be. It is a characteristic of all his greatest music.
Does Hannah Nepil, with her fingers in her ears, fail to notice this? Does the soft swish of six pairs of cymbals in the Sanctus not strike her as one of the most riveting effects in all music? Is the sound of widely spaced flutes and trombones not worthier of mention than the work’s brassy brilliance? If the Philharmonia’s performance of the Requiem was too loud, she should have blamed the conductor, Esa Pekka Salonen, rather than the composer.
Not until he wrote L’Enfance du Christ in his later years did Berlioz’s audiences recognise the restraint and purity of his music and the shock was so great that his listeners thought he had mended his ways and changed his style - to which he sadly replied that it was only his subject he had changed, not his style.
In recent years, Robin Ticciati and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra have shown what soft subtlety of tone they can bring to the Symphonie Fantastique as much as to Nuits d’Ete. That’s the Berlioz sound, and Ticciati knows how to produce it.
1 October 2014
Ms. Nepil could surely have mentioned that any orchestra performing the Berlioz in a venue like the Festival Hall has a major uphill battle with acoustics. It's not only the four brass choirs positioned around the hall, the main orchestra itself is huge with 20 woodwinds, 20 brass, 16 timpani requiring 10 players, and even 10 pairs of cymbals. Add to that lot the large choral forces and you have a volume of sound way too large for that space when fortes are required - to say nothing of fortissimos!
ReplyDeleteYet, as Conrad Wilson rightly points out, much of Berlioz' music is filled with gorgeously subtle orchestral writing, often a filigree of gossamer lightness using a palette of sound and colour quite unlike any other composer. Methinks Ms. Nepil would have benefitted from knowing more about both composer and work before attempting to review it.