Prom 31: Berlioz - The Damnation of Faust, Royal Albert Hall, London, review: 'Brimming with detail and colour'

The Prom featured conductor John Eliot Gardiner, Trinity Boys Choir, Monteverdi Choir, National Youth Choir of Scotland, and Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Monteverdi Choir, Trinity Boys Choir, National Youth Choir of Scotland, in a performance of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust at the BBC Proms (BBC/Chris Christodoulou)

Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust is an opera conceived for the concert hall – a romantic flight of fantasy so greedy for spectacle that the only stage designer who could hope to do it justice is the human imagination. It’s a work that goes down to hell, up to heaven, and finds time for dances, drinking songs, seductions and executions along the way. Never knowingly understated, it demands nothing less than complete conviction if its campy, Gallic take on Goethe’s Faust isn’t to trip over its own excess.

John Eliot Gardiner’s instinct for Berlioz has been honed over many years, and the result here was a performance brimming with detail and colour. With the orchestra (his own Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique) centre-stage, every passing instrumental flicker and aside was amplified – a sardonic bassoon here, a guffawing ophicleide there – playing dramatically off a cast which was the stuff of dreams.

Was it Ann Hallenberg’s glowing “D’amour l’ardente flame” (complete with melting solo cor anglais), the easy brilliance of Michael Spyres’ “Nature immense”, or Laurent Naouri’s plausible, clubbable Mephistopheles that was the evening’s highlight? It would be impossible to choose. Add the characterful, vigorous contributions of Gardiner’s massed choruses and a genuinely comic cameo from young bass-baritone Ashley Riches and you had exactly the kind of overflowing evening this music was made for, layering sensation on sensation. When it comes to guilty delights, Mephistopheles might just have met his match in Berlioz and Gardiner.