Andrew Clements 

Berlioz: La Captive; Herminie; La Mort de Cléopatre review

Lisa Larsson performs Berlioz's celebrated early works with aplomb, writes Andrew Clements
  
  


In 1830 Berlioz won the Prix de Rome at his fourth attempt, securing the coveted award, which offered him two years' study in the Italian capital, with La Mort de Sardanapale, easily the most conventional of the cantatas he had submitted to the judges over the years. That work is rarely heard now, but two of his earlier efforts – Herminie, composed for the 1828 competition, and La Mort de Cléeopatre from the following year – feature among Lisa Larsson's selection of early Berlioz works for soprano and orchestra with the Dutch Gelders orchestra under Antonello Manacorda; the third is La Captive, a setting of Victor Hugo, which began life as a song with piano, composed in Rome in 1832, and which Berlioz orchestrated two years later. It provides an uncomplicated interlude between the two more highly wrought scenas, though Larsson's performances of both tend to play down their histrionics; she handles the exhibitionist stuff that Berlioz includes with aplomb, but makes much more of the introspective music that so failed to impress the Prix de Rome judges.

 

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