Programme
Berlioz : L'enfance du Christ

Performers
English Chamber Orchestra
The Royal Ballet
Soloists from Covent Garden, Glyndebourne and English National Opera

Berlioz's L'enfance du Christ is a remarkable combination of opera, oratorio, symphonic poem and ballet, and is unlike anything else that Hector Berlioz wrote.

The work primarily contains beautiful choral pieces, the most famous of which is the Shepherds' Chorus in which Berlioz used a tune he pretended was by a 17th-century French composer. The false provenance worked, fooling audiences and leading to a famous remark made by a lady observer who said, "Monsieur Berlioz could never write anything as charming as that."

Unlike his other major works, L'enfance du Christ was not conceived from the outset as one work, but was begun almost by accident and grew in a piecemeal manner over a period of time. Part II La fuite en Egypte was the first to be written in 1850, Part III, L'arrivée Sais, was added in late 1853 and early 1854, with Part I Le songe d'Hérode being added last in 1854. The work was first performed complete in Dec 1854 at the Salle Herz in Paris, and was an immediate success, a result Berlioz received with mixed feelings. The success of L'enfance du Christ was, he felt, an insult to his previous works (notably La damnation de Faust, the failure of which in Paris in 1846 hurt Berlioz deeply). An indignant Berlioz later complained in his memoirs: 'Many thought they could detect in this work a complete change in my style and manner of writing. But this view is completely without foundation ... I would have written L'enfance du Christ in exactly the same way twenty years ago".

This is a lavish BAFTA-award winning production that makes use of modern televisual technical wizardry to set the action against a backdrop of paintings of Egypt and the Holy Land, elegantly fusing art and music, and is a key work with which to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the composer's birth.