The OSM ended its holiday season with The childhood of Christ by Berlioz conducted by Hervé Niquet, a project postponed from the time of the pandemic, but, above all, a very eager reading of the work.
Come on, Christmas! And be quick about it ! In any case, it is not this Berlioz at Simoniz who, with the supersonic speed of his tempos, will have delayed anyone for the distribution of gifts. The “funny” thing in Hervé Niquet’s approach became the Rest of the Holy Family at the end of part II, a quasi-farandole. For now, if one day Niquet starts to re-orchestrate Berlioz, he could add castanets! Except that in Rest of the Holy Family, there is the word “rest”. Oops !
No more jokes and sarcasm. We see very clearly what the conductor wants to do: lighten Berlioz, remove the Sulpician pomp which marks almost all of the interpretations. The work benefits from being lightened, because it contains an intrinsic emphasis which can veer towards grandiloquence.
Playing with limits
But it all depends on the degree of abrasion. You can’t turn a draft horse into a racehorse. However, the sense of measurement is not Hervé Niquet’s specialty. However, Herod’s Dream (“O misery of kings”) must retain a dimension of pain and torment, of complaint in the “endless night”. Niquet and his exalted soloist Robert Gleadow underline its revolt. This passage which leads to the resolution, by this paranoid Idumean sovereign in the service of the Romans, of the “massacre of the innocents” has words and resonances that send shivers down the spine in these times.
In a new approach to The childhood of Christ, we should also and above all make a difference between the music which advances the story (Incantations of the Sages of Judea, Flight into Egyptetc.) and that which brings moments of reflection or tenderness like Farewell of the Shepherds. Even if the latter do not need to be interpreted in a state of ecstatic daze, they do not need to be “dispatched” to show “by a + b” that Berlioz is always played too slowly. Failing to spare the spirit of these beaches and to play with the very limits of the work, Hervé Niquet’s approach turns into caricature, like his recording of German Requiem by Brahms is a pure and simple caricature.
We can obviously push the stylistic reflection much further. Basically, Hervé Niquet seems to take a position in relation to an axis opposing in France in the middle of the 19th century the expression of a sacred “symphonic”, embodied primarily by Berlioz, and the “cecilianist movement” advocating the return to Roman style established after the Council of Trent (a more “religious, more “pure” song) and one of whose apostles was Louis Niedermeyer, a Swiss who made a career in France.
Without going into a more in-depth analysis we do not think that we can make The childhood of Christ an “anti-Cécilianist” militant work by disembodiing it to the point pushed by Niquet on Tuesday. The final chorus (“O my soul”), almost sublimated Niedermayer, is the finest example of the fact that Berlioz knew how to keep the goat and the cabbage in check. And when he plays the register of “internalized religiosity” we must at least pretend a little to take the same boat as him.
In his pulverization, Hervé Niquet had the assistance of a very attentive OSM, Jean-Willy Kunz, attentive to the organ and an excellent choir. The conductor very well resolved the questions of positioning the choristers between part I (voices of angels) and II. In addition to the excellent couple formed by Gordon Bintner and Julie Boulianne, we will be satisfied with all the soloists, noting the incredible luxury of having had the tenor Cyrille Dubois as reciter. We would like to see him again in a program that calls on him more.