Berlioz: La Mort de Cléopâtre - Scène lyrique (The Death of Cleopatre)

“[Cargill] has a remarkably beautiful voice, full of sunny delicacy and warmth but also capable of Wagnerian dramatics...Ticciati's chamber forces do make a difference from the sound we're used to, without disturbing any essential balances. Against them, the brass especially, the voice sounds more at ease and more flexible...the players in turn underpin Cargill's performance with more precise shading” BBC Music Magazine, May 2013 *****

“With his second release for the Glasgow-based label Linn, Ticciati could do for the Scottish mezzo what Barbirolli did for the young Janet Baker in the 1960s. Cargill’s tone is plusher, but Baker is clearly one of her exemplars...her Nuits d’été and Cleopatra suggest a Trojans Dido of stature in the making.” Sunday Times, 28th April 2013

“the virtues that lit up [Ticciati's] Fantastique remain: piercing clarity of colour and texture; heightened drama; increased tenderness and intimacy...This is Berlioz up close and personal, and wonderful to behold. It’s Berlioz performed with love, too...Dark, mobile, richly emotional, [Cargill's] voice finds a near-perfect showcase” The Times, 3rd May 2013 ****

“[Cargill's] account of Les Nuits d'Été, wonderfully controlled and exquisitely shaded, seems to me one of the finest to appear on disc in recent years. Her performance of the Cleopatra cantata is equally subtle and meticulous...There and in Nuits d'Été, Ticciati defines the accompanying detail immaculately” The Guardian, 3rd May 2013 *****

“Ticciati’s grasp of the music’s romantic bloom is one of this disc’s attractions” Financial Times, 11th May 2013

“One of the striking facets of Ticciati's conducting and the SCO's playing in Les nuits d'ete is the clarity and details that spring from the score...The SCO's collaboration with the mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill is also an entirely felicitous one... This is a performance of Les nuits d'ete that is all of a piece” Gramophone Magazine, June 2013

“This a strong, clean-cut performance of the Symphonie fantastique...blessed with lucid playing that mirrors the translucency of Berlioz’s scoring. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts with rhythmic punch and, in the Scène aux champs, has the measure of the rustic tranquillity...Antonacci sings with thrilling intensity.” The Telegraph, 25th February 2011 ****

“You'll hear things here all too routinely buried by others. Anna Caterina Antonacci's vocal heft and dramatic instincts help unlock the anguish of Cléopâtre in the symphony's ideal companion piece....First-rate surround sound adds to this recording's lasting appeal.” Classic FM Magazine, May 2011 *****

“[an] expressive, operatic reading of the Fantastique...He's not afraid of violence, noise or audience-rousing codas - try the end of the first movement or the sweep of the ball...The fill-up is gorgeous enough to make purchase obligatory.” Gramophone Magazine, May 2011

“his Fantastique is wonderful...the best of it is almost mind-bending in its hallucinatory vividness – the last two movements have rarely sounded more weird – and the whole thing captures the sense of self-dramatising Romantic shamelessness that lurks behind it. Ultimately, then, a very fine performance.” The Guardian, 7th April 2011 ****

“one hears that what Nézet-Séguin offers (aided by a superlatively airy, open, yet richly resonant recording) is the orchestral equivalent of a Peter Hall staging - with a focus entirely on the text itself, not its extra-musical 'narrative', and with no whipped-up histrionics, just apt tempos and pinpoint placing of each note and accent.” BBC Music Magazine, May 2011 ***

“Rattle, displays the easy lyricism one might anticipate, but more power and atmosphere - Berlioz grandioso. Cléopâtre is also a big-screen performance. Mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, today's reigning Dido, makes Berlioz's earlier heroine equally epic… it's a welcome coupling.” BBC Music Magazine, September 2008 ****

“Rattle and the Berliners are capable of taking one’s breath away” Gramophone Magazine

“The opening "Rêveries - Passions" is one of the great musical expressions of sexual infatuation, one that Sir Simon Rattle shapes well… The Berlin soloists make a gorgeous sounds, the lead clarinet and cor anglais especially… La mort de Cléopâtre is… prime-cut Berlioz, outrageously advanced for its time (1827-30). Rattle obviously relishes the music's ghostly aura, much as he focuses the pre-Roméo atmosphere near the start of the "Scène lyrique". Susan Graham enacts the music's drama with a sense of theatre and a frequently rich tone, especially in the "Meditation".” Gramophone Magazine, November 2008

“inspired by Simon Rattle,[the Berlin Philharmonic] give a superb performance of the symphony. Too little is made of the bass drum’s important part in the finale - but in every other respect the playing is exemplary, with the strings really singing their music and the wind matching them with equal force. Rattle, while achieving exceptionally wide dynamic range, shapes the work with a sure hand.” Sunday Times, 14th September 2008 ****

“this is a plush, silky-smooth reading, with the Berlin sound at its most opulent and refined. Until Rattle finally gives the orchestra its head in the closing pages, the performance has a Karajan-like svelteness” The Guardian, 26th September 2008 ****

“Berlioz blended opera with symphonic form in this blazing outburst of passion, vividly realised by this wonderful ensemble.” Anthony Holden, The Observer, 31st August 2008

“This must be one of the most beautifully played performances of the Symphonie fantastique on disc. Textures have been honed, everything points to an almost obsessive search for perfection, and Simon Rattle has his players paying attention to every last detail of expression and articulation in the score.” The Telegraph, 6th September 2008

“With Nicolai Gedda and Janet Baker in their prime, a French orchestra lending Gallic bite to the colouring and Prêtre securing commitment and vitality, there's a pact to be made! By way of epilogue Cleopatra is utterly transfixing.” BBC Music Magazine, July 2007 ****

“To have on a single disc Berlioz's four attempts at the Prix de Rome, or at least as much of them as survives, was one of the most enjoyable fruits of the bicentenary year. Together they present a vivid portrait of the composer in his twenties, a Janus figure looking at once back to Gluck and forward to the more highly coloured, Romantic products of the mid-19th century. These four works are all the more extraordinary for being based on a format devised by someone else – something Berlioz preferred to avoid after BenvenutoCellini; even here he couldn't resist adding at times to the texts provided.
He tried to destroy La mort de Sardanapale, his prize-winning cantata of 1830, and only its end has survived by accident. Like its predecessors, it deals with an extreme situation. To that extent they all chimed in with Berlioz's natural propensities for shaking and stirring audiences, even to the point of aural discomfort.
It's fascinating to find so many features of the mature Berlioz already in place: the ubiquitous diminished sevenths, the hitching up of tonalities by semitones, the love of descending scales (as in the wonderful line for Cléopâtre's 'Il n'en est plus pour moi que l'éternelle nuit', which could be Dido in Les troyens some 30 years later). The poetic Berlioz is also in evidence, notably in the beautiful Nature-music that opens La mort d'Orphée, his earliest attempt from 1827.
The contribution of the solo singers on this disc belongs more to the 19th century than to the 18th, which is possibly what Berlioz would have wanted. That's to say, all three voices are dramatic in size and style. There's some spreading at the top of all three above mezzo forte, but in giving their all they're merely taking a cue from Berlioz's orchestra, which, under Casadesus's firm direction, miraculously already sounds like the Berlioz we know. In softer passages all three are excellent.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010