Wilson’s sparkle and snap

Back in the period-instrument wars of the 1980s and ’90s, when the forces of historically informed performance smashed out of their baroque beachhead and started to annex romantic repertoire, the insurgents split into two factions. Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players were the shock troops: their Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, with its filthy, rasping ophicleide, exploded like a tactical nuke. John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique went in later as peacekeepers, altogether smoother and more reassuring. Norrington’s discs started arguments; Gardiner’s won awards. As an A-level music student drunk on the hot-blooded idealism of Berlioz’s Memoirs, I was certain which one the composer would have preferred.

Well, maybe that’s not exactly how it was, but it’s how I remember it, and I’ve never wholly shaken that teenage prejudice against ‘Jiggy’, as one of those jumped-up choirmasters who Norman Lebrecht brilliantly called ‘semiconductors’. Which is why this performance of Berlioz’s 1846 ‘dramatic legend’ The Damnation of Faust came as a more pleasant surprise than perhaps it should have done.