SFS Berlioz Album Poor Substitute for Being There

This Friday the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) will release its latest SFS Media recording of a concert performance. The concert consisted entirely of Hector Berlioz’ Opus 17, a “dramatic symphony” entitled “Roméo et Juliette.” The album is based on recordings made at all performances of this piece in Davies Symphony Hall given between June 28 and July 1 in 2017. As usual, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders for this new album.

This concert was the final program of the 2016–17 season, given four performances. As “grand finales” go, things could not have been grander. The Davies stage may not have boasted a “cast of thousands;” but the resources were still pretty impressive. Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) led SFS, the SFS Chorus (Ragnar Bohlin, Director), and three vocal soloists, mezzo Sasha Cooke, tenor Nicholas Phan, and bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni. (For the record, the initial performance of Opus 17 combined the resources of 100 instrumentalists with 101 vocalists, solo and choral.)

Berlioz began work on his Opus 17 a little less than nine years after he had completed his Opus 14 “Symphonie fantastique,” which is probably his most-performed composition. Opus 14 is a major landmark in the emergence of “program music” as a genre, since the five movements follow a clearly-defined narrative line. On the other hand Opus 17 cannot be taken as a “narration” of the play by William Shakespeare after which it has been named. In writing about the first of the four concert performances, I suggested that the music “amounts to a ‘view’ of the plot; but that view is seen through a kaleidoscope, whose multiple reflections enlarge objects and distort them while blocking out other objects.”

Berlioz himself may well have had such a kaleidoscope in mind. The handbill for the concert provided a generous amount of text description for each of the symphony’s seven movements:

Handbill for the first performance of Berlioz' Opus 17 (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

All of those descriptions were reproduced (translated into English) in the SFS program book, which also included all of Émile Deschamps French texts for the vocal sections along with English translations by David Cairns. The English was also projected as surtitles; but, as regular readers should know by now, I much prefer reading from the page, because it allows me to see how the passages relate to each other.

From this account readers may conclude that, for me at least, attending this concert was a literary experience as much as a musical one. I would even be so bold as to suggest that Berlioz would have approved of my having taken such a stance in listening to this composition. He probably would also have approved of the clarity that MTT brought to his interpretation of the score, whether it involved the vocal soloists, the collective diction of the chorus, or his ability to find just the right “rhetorical glue” to bring coherence to the combination of massive vocal and instrumental resources.

It would be fair to say that the SFS Media production team did their best to create a “recorded simulacrum” to the experience of “being there.” However, it would also be fair to say that even the highest-bandwidth technology it still not yet up to accounting for the rich extent of resources required to perform Berlioz’ Opus 17. This is a challenge that simply cannot be met. When we listen to recordings, we must appreciate their shortcomings and take what we can get.

On the other hand there is no good excuse for those producers short-changing the listening experience by failing to provide all the useful text material that could be found in the program book. The movement descriptions for the track listings woefully short-change the descriptions that Berlioz himself had provided; and the vocal texts are entirely absent in both French and English. As a result, I would suggest that only those coming to this recording with a rich understanding of the content, literary, as well as musical, of Opus 17 are likely to be engaged with the music for its roughly 90-minute entirety.

To be fair, I do not know for certain if a recording with a better source of background information is available. My only other recording is from my collection of the complete RCA recordings made by Arturo Toscanini, for which there are, for all intents and purposes, no useful booklet notes. However, even that album provided a closer (even if not close enough) account of the original Berlioz movement descriptions. I saved my SFS concert program book to keep with that Toscanini collection, and I am definitely glad to have done so!