Opportunities to hear Hector Berlioz’s song cycle Les Nuits d’été (Summer Nights) – orchestrated or not – are sadly rare in Melbourne, probably because of the interpretative challenges it presents for the soloist. Swedish mezzo-soprano Katarina Karnéus sang it with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2003, and soprano Camilla Tilling, another Swede, performed it at the Melbourne Recital Centre in 2016, with Leigh Harrold at the piano. There are many fine recordings of the cycle, notable examples being Janet Baker (conducted by Adrian Boult) and Régine Crespin (conducted by Ernest Ansermet); a favourite of mine, less celebrated, is the Belgian soprano Suzanne Danco’s 1951 recording conducted by Thor Johnson.

Born in 1803, Berlioz – the quintessential Romantic – had a relatively small oeuvre. Liszt and Paganini both considered him the true successor to Beethoven, but Berlioz’s irreverence towards the musical establishment won him many detractors, and they persist today. For some of us, though, his writing for the female voice is equal to that of Mozart and Strauss.

Les Nuits d’été has a curious, inadvertent history. It was probably composed in the summer of 1840, when Berlioz was thirty-six. Two years earlier, his friend Théophile Gautier had published La Comédie de la mort, a book full of imagery associated with Romanticism: the shadow of a yew tree, the spirit of a rose blossom, etc. This is poetry of exotic places and climes, ‘perceived through the mists of reverie’, as one writer has noted.

Berlioz set six of the fifty-six poems in Gautier’s collection. They were published in 1841 for a high voice and piano. Bizarre though it may seem to devotees in the twenty-first century, these published songs were originally intended for different singers. D. Kern Holoman, in his biography, Berlioz (1989), writes:

The dedications before each song show that the set was not a vehicle for a specific singer but rather a gift to a musical establishment … No studied unity of melodic or harmonic design informs the Nuits d’été … The performance of a cycle of songs had little place on his kind of programs.

Absence, fourth in the cycle, was orchestrated in 1843, but Le spectre de la rose (the second), had to wait until 1856, and its success led to the orchestration of the remaining songs. There can be little doubt that the cycle is at its most persuasive when orchestrated.

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the Ryman Healthcare Spring Gala, conducted by Jaime Martín (photograph by Laura Manariti)

How fitting that Joyce DiDonato should choose Les Nuits d’été for her Australian début (she had sung it earlier with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra). The American mezzo-soprano, now based in Spain, has a long association with Berlioz’s music. She has been singing Les Nuits for more than twenty years. Hers is an unusually diverse repertoire, with about forty roles to date, many of them drawn from the works of Handel, Mozart, and Rossini. Her sole Donizetti opera was Maria Stuarda, where she has sung both rival queens. She has a marked interest in new opera and has created six roles, including, most recently, Virginia Woolf in Kevin Puts’s The Hours. French characters have included Charlotte, Didon, and the title role in the brilliant Laurent Pelly production of Cendrillon at the Metropolitan Opera.

On the eve of this performance, before a large audience at the Iwaki Studio, DiDonato led a masterclass for three fortunate young local singers. She was funny, charming, generous, enquiring: not a trace of jet-lagged de haut en bas. At one point, DiDonato, asked about Les Nuits, spoke of Berlioz’s perfection when it came to creating music of grief and loss.

Her affinity with the composer was evident throughout the long, testing cycle, right from the exuberant paean to verdancy that opens it (Villanelle). The four songs that follow – so profoundly different in mood and tone from Villanelle and L’Île inconnue, which closes the cycle – drew singing of consummate artistry and control from their rapt interpreter. In his biography, Holoman drew our attention to ‘the pronounced downward drive of the melodies: the inevitable conclusion of nocturnal reverie is sleep’. DiDonato, taking these plaintive songs slowly, accentuated their gravity, their narcotic languor. There was a hushed quality to much of the singing (always audible, though, such is DiDonato’s technique), then radiant outbursts such as the refrain in the lament Sur les lagunes, ‘Ah! sans amour s’en aller sur la mer!’ Best of all perhaps was Absence, with its perilously high opening line, ‘Reviens, reviens, ma bien aimée!’, which is repeated twice. DiDonato’s vocal resources were apparent in the impassioned outbursts that followed. This was phrasing and legato singing of unusual communicative power and absorption.

During the masterclass DiDonato had spoken of the chamber music-like quality needed for Les Nuits. Here she was partnered sympathetically and unerringly by Jaime Martín, who drew from the players music of great feeling and assurance. Never was there any contest between soloist and orchestra.

DiDonato, responding to the enthusiastic audience, was generous with her encores: Bizet’s Habanera from Carmen and a deeply felt ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ (superbly orchestrated). Imagine a concert of American song from this charismatic artist. Her rapport with Martín and his orchestra was clear: let us hope it is not long before she returns to Melbourne.

The concert began with a rousing version of the overture from Rossini’s William Tell, suspensefully introduced by David Berlin’s eloquent cello. The second half of the gala was anti-climactic: the Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome by Ottorino Resphigi. Of the former little can be said in its favour: it is slight, decorative music. Pines of Rome, also in four parts, is more engaging, especially the final two parts (‘Janiculum’) and (‘Appian Way’). For the nightingale in ‘Janiculum’, Respighi requested a gramophone recording of the bird. ‘Appian Way’ ended in a blaze of lustrous sound, with brilliant work from the brass, four of them in the upper balconies. This was excellent playing from the entire orchestra, but overall the choice of Respighi felt like an opportunity missed after such a transcendent rendition of the Berlioz.

Ryman Healthcare Spring Gala: Joyce DiDonato was presented at Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne on 20 and 22 November 2025. Performance attended: November 20.