![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2017\/11\/Berlioz-Be\u0301atrice-et-Be\u0301ne\u0301dict.-Glyndebourne-Festival-2016.jpg\")
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In must have been quite a night in Paris, September 11, 1827, when a touring company from England presented Shakespeare\u2019s Othello<\/em>, with Harriet Smithson as Ophelia. By all accounts, Smithson gave a stunning performance. The audience included the leading writers, artists and composers of the day, among them 24-year old Hector Berlioz. The young composer was smitten with Smithson, both as an actress and as a woman. Berlioz fantasized about her for years to come and finally married her in 1833. She was the woman of his dreams, at least until they began living together. The marriage didn\u2019t last. But that production of Othello <\/em>also sparked in Berlioz a life-long devotion to the plays of Shakespeare, which inspired his composition of various shorter pieces such as Tristia<\/em> Op. 18 and the King Lear Overture<\/em>, as well as two major works, the \u201cdramatic symphony\u201d Rom\u00e9o et Juliette,<\/em> and the comic opera B\u00e9atrice et B\u00e9n\u00e9dict<\/em>, based on Shakespeare\u2019s Much Ado About Nothing.<\/em> Berlioz himself conducted the first performance of this opera in 1862.<\/p>\n Berlioz also wrote the libretto for B\u00e9atrice et B\u00e9n\u00e9dict<\/em>. Only moderately successful, it cuts out most of the play except for the main storyline involving the couple B\u00e9atrice and B\u00e9n\u00e9dict, who delight in insulting and otherwise abusing each other, only to admit in the end that they really love each other madly. As director Laurent Pelly has noted, \u201cthere is little real action in this opera\u2026the main interest in B\u00e9atrice et B\u00e9n\u00e9dict<\/em>, as in all opera, lies above all in the music. First and foremost, I stage the music.\u201d Pelly is a very resourceful director \u2014 his 2007 staging of Donizetti\u2019s La Fille du r\u00e9giment<\/em> starring Natalie Dessay was absolutely magical \u2014 and on this new Opus-Arte release, he gives us a highly original and entertaining rendering of this rarely-performed opera by Berlioz.<\/p>\n The set, conceived by Pelly and executed by Barbara de Limburg, consists almost entirely of boxes \u2014 about a dozen of them \u2014 moved around, piled on top of each other, opened to reveal unexpected objects inside and so on. The idea is that the two leading characters refuse to live in a box; that is, to do what is expected of them. Lots of dramatic possibilities here and even the movement of the boxes by costumed stagehands is done with carefully planned choreography.<\/p>\n There are two set pieces, one in each act, that allow Pelly to fully exploit the comic possibilities of the story. The scene with the chorus and Lionel Lhote as the ridiculous conductor Somarone is hilarious, as is the wedding banquet in Act II, featuring an absurdly elongated table with Lhote as a bumbling ringmaster.<\/p>\n But it is the music that makes a B\u00e9atrice et B\u00e9n\u00e9dict<\/em> revival worthwhile, and in this Glyndebourne production, it is rendered with finesse and style. St\u00e9phanie d\u2019Oustrac as B\u00e9atrice is a gifted actress and sings beautifully, especially in her Act II aria based on the slow section of the Overture. Sophie Karth\u00e4user as H\u00e9ro is a little rough in the beginning but joins with Katarina Bradi\u0107 for a sublime duet at the end of Act I.<\/p>\n I first got to know this opera from the 1962 recording conducted by Colin Davis (1927-2013) (L\u2019Oiseaux-lyre SOL 256-7). Davis was a Berlioz specialist and went on to make two more recordings of the piece. However, I suspect that Davis had doubts about the opera\u2019s viability on stage. Although he conducted a lot of opera during his long career \u2014 he headed Sadler\u2019s Wells Opera and later the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden \u2014 to my knowledge, he only conducted a staged production of B\u00e9atrice et B\u00e9n\u00e9dict<\/em> very late in his career, at the Royal Academy of Music in 2011. Laurent Pelly might have changed his mind. Pelly\u2019s Glyndebourne production makes a very persuasive case for the opera\u2019s viability on stage.<\/p>\n Hector Berlioz: Beatrice et Benedict is available from amazon.ca<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Want more updates on Toronto-centric classical music news and reviews before anyone else finds out? Follow us on\u00a0<\/i>Facebook<\/i><\/u><\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0<\/i>Twitter<\/i><\/u><\/a>\u00a0for all the latest.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is the music that makes a B\u00e9atrice et B\u00e9n\u00e9dict revival worthwhile and in this Glyndebourne production.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":48875,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6439,43,5739,52],"tags":[13257,1447,1534],"yst_prominent_words":[13085,13252,13243,13242,13253,13193,13250,13246,13254,13244,13251,13256,13247,6616,6886,13249,13245,13255,8214,13248],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2017\/11\/Berlioz-Be\u0301atrice-et-Be\u0301ne\u0301dict.-Glyndebourne-Festival-2016.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-cIi","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48874"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48874"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48879,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48874\/revisions\/48879"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48874"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=48874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Berlioz:](\"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2017\/11\/Berlioz-Be\u0301atrice-et-Be\u0301ne\u0301dict.jpg\")
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