Berlioz - La damnation de Faust (Arthaus Musik)

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This live recording was made at the Royal Albert Hall during one of London’s famous Promenade Concert seasons. Sir Georg Solti conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a magnificent performance of Berlioz’s concert cantata. This feast of Berlioz launched Solti’s farewell tour with the orchestra he had directed for twenty years and was described by The Times as 'the unsurpassable culmination of two decades of music-making...one that summarised all that has been most admirable about Solti’s long reign in Chicago.'

The soloists are Ann Sofie von Otter (Marguerite - mezzo-soprano), Keith Lewis (Faust - tenor), Jose van Dam (Mephistopheles - baritone) and Peter Rose (Brander - bass).

'Like reading the book by flashes of lightning' was how one writer described the relationship of Berlioz to Goethe in this ‘Dramatic Legend’, his way of shaping twenty scenes selected from the story into a narrative in four parts. Though it has sometimes been staged, the work’s drama is to be found within the music itself, which illuminates the incidents with what the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham once called 'a bunch of the loveliest tunes in existence'.

01. Hector Berlioz: La Damnation de Faust