Fine though much of it is, Ivor Bolton’s new album for the Sinfonieorchester Basel’s own label doesn’t live up to its name. It aims to examine Shakespeare’s influence on Berlioz, a vast subject that ideally needs a retrospective rather than a single disc to do it justice. Only two of the four works included here, however – the overture Le Roi Lear and the Scène d’amour from Roméo et Juliette – take Shakespeare as direct inspiration. The Rêverie et Caprice for violin and orchestra reworks material originally jettisoned from the opera Benvenuto Cellini, though its stylistic similarities to the Roméo extract are telling and certainly warrant the juxtaposition. The cantata La Mort de Cléopâtre shares its subject with Antony and Cleopatra, though the text, a neoclassical effort by Pierre-Ange Viellard, is closer to Racine than Shakespeare in style and tone.
La Mort de Cléopâtre comes last on the disc and is also its weak link, which is the responsibility neither of Bolton nor his orchestra. He’s an admirable Berliozian, wonderfully alert to the mix of classical precision and Romantic intensity that makes this music unique. The playing, all dark strings and sculpted woodwind, is superb, too, but Bolton’s decision to deploy period rather than conventional brass makes the orchestral sound disquietingly comfortless rather than opulent. Vesselina Kasarova’s Cléopâtre, however, is a major drawback. It lies too high for her. Fine moments of insight – there’s an extraordinary surge of self-hatred at the memory of Actium – don’t compensate for a bottled quality at the top of the voice, where her intonation also comes adrift on occasion.
The rest of it impresses. South Korean violinist Soyoung Yoon sounds suave in the Rêverie et Caprice. The Roméo et Juliette extract is very adult and sensual, rightly acknowledging that Berlioz’s lovers are older and more knowing than their Shakespearean counterparts. Le Roi Lear, one of the few works to find a musical language appropriate to the play, is gaunt, titanic and thrillingly done. It’s well worth hearing, but the replacement of Cléopâtre with another work – the Tempest Fantasia from Lélio, for instance – would have been preferable.
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