Berlioz: La Damnation de Faust review – sell your soul for a damned fine Faust

The 150th anniversary of Hector Berlioz’s death has brought a slew of strong additions to the composer’s discography, including at least two top-notch recordings of his “légende dramatique” on the Faust story. Simon Rattle’s version with the LSO came out in the spring; now it is joined by this one, which swaggers confidently on to the scene as the follow-up to John Nelson’s 2017 Les Troyens, a recording that won prizes from just about everyone.

It was recorded live at concerts in April in the fantastically ugly, red-Lego setting of Strasbourg’s Salle Erasme; we get a good flavour of the occasion from a bonus DVD, which includes around 40 minutes of highlights while for some unfortunate reason leaving out the rest. Nelson is once again brilliantly on Berlioz’s wavelength, getting a performance from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg that strikes sparks on the imagination. And this is, after all, a work that was intended to be performed in concert – an opera of the mind’s eye – even though it has become almost standard for it to be staged. Throughout, the performance captures the way the work balances on the cusp of high Romanticism. Nothing is messy, nothing overdone, but details pop out everywhere, whether it’s the zinging accompaniment to Alexandre Duhamel’s aptly thuggish Brander in the tavern scene, the spikiness that warns us Marguerite’s dreams are not as good as she thinks, or the sudden electricity in the air at Méphistophélès’s arrival. The devil is Nicolas Courjal, singing charmingly in a beefy yet elegant bass; Joyce DiDonato is initially demure, then quietly impassioned as Marguerite, and the cor anglais solo in her aria is quite meltingly beautiful. Best of all, though, is tenor Michael Spyres, who dispatches the long and difficult title role with almost superhuman ease, the notes dripping like honey. You’re unlikely to hear this role sung better.

This week’s other picks

Damnation and redemption were already on Berlioz’s mind two decades earlier, when he wrote his Messe Solennelle, a work he claimed to have burned but which turned up in an Antwerp organ loft in 1991. Berlioz fans will enjoy picking out the bits he later recycled; the Gratias agimus tibi, for example, became the slow movement of the Symphonie Fantastique. Hervé Niquet and his period-instrument ensemble Le Concert Spirituel give it a dramatic, cathedral-scale performance to rival John Eliot Gardiner’s 1994 recording; it gains gravitas but loses clarity in the resonant acoustic of Versailles’s Chapelle Royale.