English National Opera, London Coliseum
June 2014

When Hector Berlioz’s first opera was staged at the Paris Opéra in 1838 the musicians declared the radical new score impossible to play and the baffled audience expressed their dissatisfaction by rioting. The work sank without much trace throughout the rest of the 19th century, only to re-emerge, and then only fitfully, as a result of the Berlioz revival of the late-1950s and 60s. A shame as, despite a dramaturgical weakness that focuses unduly on the romantic sub-plot, personally I would put Benvenuto Cellini firmly in my top ten underrated opera scores of all time.

A high-octane tale of thwarted love and artistic ambition, Berlioz took a single episode in the life of the 16th-century Florentine sculptor and mixed a heady cocktail of commedia del arte style high jinks, rom-com and, for its time, avant-garde artistic politics. Brewing in his mind for a decade, he lavished every jot and tittle of his creative imagination upon his long-dreamt of operatic premiere to produce a score of mercurial wit, orchestrational majesty and sheer bare-faced originality.

For the first screening in its new initiative down under, London’s English National Opera have appropriately chosen an opera that...