Berlioz: Herminie - Scène lyrique (cantata)

Ondine is delighted to announce a new release from star soprano Véronique Gens, who performs Herminie and Les Nuits d’été by Hector Berlioz and Shéhérazade by Maurice Ravel with the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire under the baton of their music director John Axelrod.

Véronique Gens is recognised internationally as one of the great sopranos working today. She has forged her career in the baroque repertory and the music of Mozart, but French repertoire, especially Berlioz and Ravel, are “as natural to her as the air that she breathes”. Her French remains a model of immaculate diction, both fluid and luminous.

Véronique Gens has a very special relationship to Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été and Herminie, and here combines them on this disc with Shéhérazade by Ravel, which conjures up a totally different world.

The charismatic conductor John Axelrod was appointed music director of the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire in 2009, and follows the philosophy of being “open to the world” with his extraordinarily diverse repertoire choices and innovative programming. He is sought after across the world both for concerts and opera.

Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique of 1830 was his direct response to hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the first time. He claimed that the work ‘took up music from where Beethoven left it’. There can be no doubt that the revolutionary German composer had a huge influence upon the hot-headed young French composer, who already had a thorough knowledge of Beethoven’s Third, Fifth and Seventh Symphonies from a series of concerts given in Paris conducted by François Antoine Habeneck in 1828. However, Berlioz’s style owes a lot to Cherubini and Spontini as well. These two giants of the Paris Opera were admired by Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner, and the ‘modern’ music they composed captured the feverish and impassioned imagination of the young Berlioz.

At the time of composing the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz was head over heels in love with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, having seen her in every production of Shakespeare. Berlioz placed himself, the artist, at the centre of the action in his programmatic symphony. Although the five movements or character pieces can be difficult to grasp if one approaches this work as one would a Beethoven symphony, once the events in the composer’s life can be laid over the musical goings-on, the work suddenly gels into a fantastical journey through the mind of a love-obsessed, opium-drugged artist. Strange visions haunt him on his journey, and all these are illustrated in extraordinary scoring and effects. The early cantata Herminie (1828) was written for the Prix de Rome contest, and is one of four that Berlioz composed for the competition. He came second, probably due to the ‘dissident’ way he concluded the work, not in a blaze of glory which the conservative judges (led by Berton, who disliked Spontini intensely) expected, but in a quiet, lengthy diminuendo ending pianissimo for cellos alone. Otherwise the work is efficient and well executed. Berlioz drew on this work when composing his symphony Romeo and Juliet, and one theme from it appears in the Symphonie fantastique.

Apart from the operas, Berlioz wrote a large number of vocal works. Between 1827 and 1830, he attempted the coveted Prix de Rome on four occasions, winning at his final attempt. This prize, established for musicians by Napoleon, brought with it a stay of two years in Rome at the Villa Medici, and was a significant honour for any ambitious young composer. The four now little-known Prix de Rome Cantatas, including the fascinating Herminie whose introduction was later to become the idée fixe of the Symphonie fantastique are brought together on this recording in the year of the bicentenary celebrations of Berlioz’s birth.