Harold en Italie, La mort de Cléopâtre

Violist Antoine Tamestit and mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill join forces with the London Symphony and Valery Gergiev in the latest installment of their Berlioz exploration. 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. “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.” (Karen Cargill) ‘Antoine Tamestit…brought a strong, forthright personality to t