Utah’s Fischer Follows Saint-Saëns with Berlioz

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording begin discussed

Having completed their project to record all of the symphonies of Camille Saint-Saëns last year, the Utah Symphony led by Music Director Thierry Fischer have shifted their attention to an earlier French composer. Readers may recall that one of the composers whose music was parodied in Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals, included in the final CD of the symphonies project, was Hector Berlioz. Basically, Saint-Saëns had elephants dancing to the “Danse des sylphes” from La damnation de Faust.

Perhaps that tomfoolery motivated Fischer to present a more serious account of Berlioz in his latest recording, which was released by Hyperion Records at the end of February. Most of the recording is devoted to “Symphonie fantastique,” Berlioz’ Opus 14 and probably his best-known composition. The remaining three tracks are devoted to the Opus 8 (entitled “Rêverie et caprice” and originally intended for the Opus 23 Benvenuto Cellini opera), the second of the three pieces in the Tristia (Opus 18) collection, setting a ballade by Ernest Legouvé based on William Shakespeare’s account of the death of Ophelia in his play Hamlet, and the Opus 11 choral setting of Victor Hugo’s “Sara la baigneuse” (Sara the bather). Philippe Quint is the violin soloist in the performance of Opus 8; and, for the last two selections, the Utah Symphony is joined by both the Utah Symphony Chorus and the University of Utah Chamber Choir.

All of these selections are definitely given the attention they deserve. Indeed, Fischer has joined many current conductors in deciding to take the repeat of the exposition in the opening movement of Opus 14. (I grew up knowing that repeat only through my copy of the score, never in any performance or recording that I encountered.) Nevertheless, from a rhetorical point of view, I felt as if Fischer had decided to smooth over many (most?) of the sharp edges in the composer’s rhetoric. While it may be true that this symphony has become so familiar as to lose much of its power to provoke, it almost seemed as if Fischer was treating it as a museum-piece, rather than a source of intense expressiveness that would reverberate into the works of many subsequent nineteenth-century composers.

For those that do not already know this fun fact, the “Three Bs” phrase was coined by Peter Cornelius in 1854. At that time, Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven were followed by Berlioz. It was only later in the century that the conductor Hans von Bülow bumped Berlioz off the list and replaced him with Johannes Brahms!

The remaining selections on the album are more intimate. Nevertheless, here, again, Fischer never seems to muster the sort of expressiveness that will draw the sympathetic listener into the music. It almost seems as if unfamiliarity is the only virtue he sees in these pieces. To be fair, I first came to know Opus 8 through a recording that violinist James Ehnes made for Chandos, which I wrote about during my Examiner.com days in May of 2015. On the other hand I only encountered the two choral selections when Warner Classics released its Complete Works collection in February of last year, in which “La mort d’Ophélie” is performed in its original version for soprano and piano.

Thus, while I appreciate the effort that Fischer put into his latest recording project, the performances themselves never really registered in the context of my own listening experiences.