Five days after his semi-staging of Monteverdi’s Orfeo with the English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner was back at the Albert Hall with the period band he founded for the 19th-century repertoire, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Their programme consisted of two groundbreaking symphonies, Beethoven’s Fifth and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Pairing those two composers always underlines the debt that Berlioz owed to Beethoven, but it also emphasises how startlingly original and radical his own take on the symphony was in a work conceived only three years after Beethoven’s death.
Gardiner had asked the violins and violas of the ORR to stand throughout both works, and he brought the woodwind and brass to their feet for the last movement of the Fifth, too. Even then, though, his performance seemed generalised. Though the orchestral playing was consistently excellent, the Albert Hall’s acoustics blurred too much of what was surely much more incisive when it left the stage – by the time it reached the stalls only the outlines survived and too much detail had been lost.
The Berlioz generally fared better. Its gestures are bigger, bolder, its textures often more exposed, and as well as the dramatic energy that Gardiner brought to the performance, there was the raw vividness of the instrumental writing to relish. The four harps, placed antiphonally behind the violins for most of the symphony, clustered around the conductor to add their embroidery to the ball scene, with brilliant contributions from the two cornets later in the same movement; the pair of ophicleides provided a menacing pedal rasp to the March to the Scaffold, and the quacking E flat clarinet set the manic tone for the Witches’ Sabbath.
But then, after taking so much care with getting the sound world as close as possible to what Berlioz would have imagined, Gardiner astonishingly opted for pre-recorded bells, booming all too electronically from off stage, in the closing section of the finale. It seemed entirely out of place – more like a Hollywood Bowl version of the 1812 Overture than a meticulous performance of Berlioz.
• Available on BBC iPlayer until 8 September. The Proms continue until 12 September.
