Tenebrae excel themselves: They’re the performance’s rock. - 13.08.07

[CD Review – Colin Davis/LSO/Tenebrae L’Enfance du Christ] The Times, 10 August 2007, Geoff Brown

In 1977 the previous Colin Davis recording of Berlioz’s intimate “sacred trilogy” L’Enfance du Christ occupied two vinyl Philips LPs. If you followed the libretto on your lap with the pages unfolded, you were holding an object 2ft long. Now, with this new CD release, drawn from the London Symphony Orchestra’s Barbican concerts in December last year, you will need a magnifying glass.

Changes in packaging and technology have had no affect on Davis’s love and understanding of Berlioz. He adopts much the same speeds. He knows where the work’s heart lies and how to conjure its spell from the music’s limpid simplicity and antiquarian turns of phrase. True, the microphones pick up the conductor’s back-of-the-throat growls as they never did 30 years ago; and that must be reckoned with. But those unplanned vocal ornaments fade beside the all-round achievement of this life-enhancing set – the seventh Berlioz release to emerge from Davis and LSO Live.

The Narrator’s strengths leap out immediately. He’s Yann Beuron, and he was stepping into a part originally meant for Ian Bostridge (indisposed). Yet there’s no sign of discomfort: his fresh lyric tenor gives the words a special rapture.

Plus he’s French: an obvious boon in a language where inflection means so much. Still, no one in the cast seriously falls down on the vowels. Karen Cargill and William Dazeley maintain a humble gravity as Mary and Joseph, and they sound born to duet; while Matthew Rose brings humanity to Herod. Behind and around lie the chorus. Here, the chamber choir Tenebrae excel themselves: wonder radiates from every securely focused, cleanly voiced chord. They’re the performance’s rock.

And the recording? Happily, for much of the time there’s a warmth and softness to the sound not always caught in LSO Live releases from the frost-bitten Barbican Hall. The hall bites back occasionally: note the overloaded sound and coarse strings in the overture to part two. But in delicate moments, when a few instruments weave, the charm returns. On balance, nothing here, not a growl, not a rasp, ruins the magic of L’Enfance du Christ – the only Berlioz vocal spectacular to follow the precept clutched by journalists short of space: less is more.

(LSO Live)