Search - London Symphony Orchestra :: Berlioz: Harold en Italie & La mort de Cléopâtre

Violist Antoine Tamestit, and mezzo-soprano, Karen Cargill join forces with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev, in the latest installment of their Berlioz exploration.

Composed in 1834 at the suggestion of Paganini and later completed in Montmartre, Harold en Italie received its first performance at the Conservatoire de Paris later that year. "I wanted to make the viola a kind of melancholy dreamer" - Hector Berlioz. Taking inspiration from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Harold en Italie is among the most poetic of Berlioz's oeuvre, its ingenious use of solo viola charting the dreamy Harold's wanderings throughout the Italian countryside, and the characters encountered along the way.

In this new recording Antoine Tamestit brings a strong, forthright personality to the hero of Harold en Italie. "Maestro Gergiev's deep musicianship added the sort of instinctive passion one needs with Berlioz and especially with Harold en Italie. All of this was overwhelmingly inspiring for me and made these concerts and recordings a truly unique and unforgettable experience," says Tamestit.

Karen Cargill gives an emotionally intense performance of the dramatic cantata for La mort de Cléopâtre. She says of the piece, "La mort de Cléopâtre is a monumental work, grand in drama, orchestration and vocally challenging. The scope of the piece is huge, not only emotionally - it has a vocal range of over two octaves within only a few pages, ultimately quite operatic in delivery. Pacing the work is a huge part of performing it, allowing the character to recollect, reflect and ultimately act. The death scene is so wonderfully written, so simple and real."