Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust (Live)

Here’s a performance of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust that shimmers with glorious orchestral detail while still packing a substantial dramatic punch. Part opera, part oratorio/cantata, Damnation, based on Part I of Goethe’s play Faust, features some of Berlioz’s finest and most innovative music—but live performances are thin on the ground. Traditionally, concert halls have shied away from its theatrics, while opera houses have found its fluctuating narrative tricky to stage effectively. Enter Edward Gardner who enjoys the rare distinction of having conducted a staged version of the work, in an acclaimed 2011 English National Opera production directed by filmmaker and former Monty Python member, Terry Gilliam. It was everything you’d expect from a Gilliam project: garish, cartoonish and totally mad, and suited Berlioz’s concept perfectly. Twelve years later, Gardner might not have those arresting visuals in front of him, but judging from the sheer immediacy and vibrancy of this concert performance (the way Berlioz intended it to be performed), he’s clearly still deeply in love with the music. “You need to make sure in this music that nothing is flatlined or taken for granted,” he tells Apple Music Classical. “Every colour has to speak.” Gardner talks vividly about Berlioz’s fertile musical imagination. “He loved Beethoven, and the extremes of Beethoven,” he says, “the way that Beethoven could make you feel his music in your body. That was a new thing, wasn’t it?” Damnation of Faust contains much of what Gardner calls the composer’s “extraordinary, mad, diffused imagination”. There’s “La course à l’abîme” (“The Ride to the Abyss”) in Part IV that Gardner believes sounds as modern as Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring. “Those wild birds shrieking and the volcanic low brass—no one else can write it,” he insists. The London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir are alive to every one of those eccentric ideas. “The LPO is an amazingly flexible orchestra, and they play a lot of opera,” explains Gardner. “I guess I try to fire their imagination with what this piece can be.” The vocal lineup is close to ideal, too: Christopher Purves and Jonathan Lemalu are weighty and characterful as the scheming Mephistopheles and drunken Brander; Karen Cargill is on sensational form as the seductive Marguerite—her aria at the opening of Part IV is exquisitely shaped. John Irvin’s lithe tenor brings a radiance, fragility and, eventually, a petrified vulnerability, to his performance as Faust. Captured in just one performance in February 2023, this recording represents something of a seal on Gardner’s relationship with the LPO, an orchestra he took over at the tail-end of the pandemic, in 2021. “Now we’re two and a half years in, we’ve done a lot of range of repertoire, and we really get to trust and know each other,” says Gardner. “I’m loving it!”