[ALBSA-Info] Shkoza in Berlioz's Faust

[Agron Alibali]

                               The Times (London)
The Times
October 18, 2000, Wednesday
 Berlioz in all his Technicolor glory


    LSO/Davis

    Barbican/Radio 3

    Hilary Finch

    BERLIOZ knew all too well that the amphitheatre of
the imagination could be 
broader and more resonant than the interior of an
opera house; and so he
insisted that his "dramatic legend", The Damnation of
Faust, be strictly for
concert performance. As the London Symphony
Orchestra's Berlioz Odyssey
approaches its final destination in next month's
performances of The Trojans,
the imaginative prowess of both performers and
listeners was thrillingly tested 
in Berlioz's response to Goethe's masterwork.

    From the plains of Hungary to the taverns of
Leipzig, from Hell to Paradise,
Berlioz's music lingers then leaps ahead, pans wide
then zooms in, with a
cinematographer's visionary animation of its tableaux
vivants.

    Colin Davis was in the director's chair. His
understanding of Berlioz, and
the LSO's intuitive grasp of his responses, is now
such that music is made as if
by a sixth sense. Think only of the way a single viola
line was swept up into a 
radiant orchestral dome of light as Faust's first dawn
breaks. Or of how
Mephistopheles's invocation of the will-o'-the-wisps
became a virtuoso
choreography of orchestral pizzicato. Or - perhaps
most extraordinary of all -
how Davis paced the final Ride to the Abyss, every
vowel and hoof-beat telling
in this hurtle of Hell.

    The London Symphony Chorus deserve the next lot of
praise. They, after all, 
have the responsibility for leading and setting each
rapidly shifting scene, and
their carnival of characterisation - from dancing
peasants to pious Christians, 
from boozers to gnomes, sylphs and soldiers and back
again - was as remarkable
as was their virtuosity of rhythm and enunciation.

    Which leaves the soloists. Some audience members
were bemoaning the lack of 
an authentically Gallic team. But there is nothing
like an enthusiastic Italian 
for getting tongue and larynx round the French
language, if he has the will. And
Giuseppe Sabbatini's Faust, with his acute sense of
the play of an individual
conscience against a fast-moving diorama, would have
delighted Berlioz. His
searing open vowels and tactile consonants brought
anger and frustration to a
brooding grief; his final yearning cry for Marguerite
silenced the house.

    Michele Pertusi's dark Mephistopheles was by turns
menacing and melancholy: 
his Flea Song was chillingly elegant and understated.
Marguerite was sung with
chaste ecstasy by the  Albanian  mezzo, Enkelejda
Shkosa, and David
Wilson-Johnson stepped in at short notice as a
rollicking ratcatcher of a
Brander.


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