UK audiences are spoilt as far as Les Troyens is concerned. British conductors have always championed Berlioz's astonishing tragedy. Thomas Beecham's performances in the 1950s kept the work alive at a time when the rest of the world deemed it otiose and excessive. Colin Davis put the opera back on the international map at Covent Garden a decade later.
Whether the Edinburgh festival performance under Donald Runnicles will attain such epoch-making status is open to debate. Runnicles has, unwisely perhaps, accepted the inauthentic division of the work into two parts, and instead of hearing the two chunks on successive evenings, we get them a week apart. I'm not sure the opera's cumulative impact can sustain such a wrenching split.
It should also be added, however, that Runnicles's performance of La Prise de Troie, to give the first half its separate title, was electrifying. The horrific atmosphere of the final days of the Trojan war (or any war, for that matter) is vividly conjured up.
The mood is close to hysteria; and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's playing aptly teeters on the brink of stridency, while the Edinburgh Festival Chorus sing as if their lives depended on it. Occasionally the voltage is a fraction too high: the vast octet, for instance, loses its sculpted, neo-classical quality.
Runnicles is at his best when his Cassandra, Petra Lang, is on the platform. Deranged yet tragically dignified, she is outstanding, whether parrying the erotic demands of Christopher Maltman's sexy, urgent Chorebus, or leading the Trojan women in their maenadic mass suicide. Aeneas, American tenor Hugh Smith, is fierce in his passionate declamation.
An exceptional evening, no question, though how Runnicles and his cast will fare in the second part, when private tragedy replaces the cataclysm of war, remains to be seen.
Les Troyens, Part 2 is at the Usher Hall on Saturday. Box office: 0131-473 2000.
