Berlioz's last opera is a problem, dramatically if not musically. It is a divertissement more than a fully rounded stage work, which pares away Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing to leave just the essential relationship between Beatrice and Benedick, counterpointed against the romantic love of Hero for Claudio.
In the tradition of the French opéra comique the musical numbers are connected with dialogue, and that nowadays presents the main problem in performance - do you keep all of Berlioz's text, and have a probably polyglot collection of singers struggling through the speech in bad French, or find some alternative?
For the latest instalment of his Berlioz Odyssey with the London Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis came up with a curious hybrid. With singers to the left of him and actors to the right, he conducted a performance in which the score was threaded through with chunks of the original Shakespeare selected by the director Elijah Moshinsky. It provided a (sometimes not very convincing) continuity but little conviction; there was always a massive change of gear when text (spiritedly delivered by a line-up headed by Barbara Flynn and Hilton McRae) gave way to music. Far better to have dispensed with the spoken words altogether.
Certainly the musical performances were more than good enough to stand alone. Guided by Davis the LSO is masterly in Berlioz; they make the music dance and take wing, while their hushed string playing at the end of the first act could only have been achieved by an orchestra of the very highest possible class. Perhaps the Albanian mezzo Enkelejda Shkosa was miscast as Beatrice (a gorgeously velvet voice, but a bit weighty for a work that Berlioz described as "a caprice written with the point of a needle"), but Kenneth Tarver's Benedict was nimble and elegant, Susan Gritton's Hero impassioned and commanding, and Sara Mingardo a luxury piece of casting as Ursule. David Wilson-Johnson nearly stole the show, and all the dramatic plaudits certainly, in his single number as Somarone.
• Repeated at the Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), tonight; and broadcast on Radio 3.
