HECTOR BERLIOZ FOR THE HOLIDAYS--AND AFTER

What’s this? Christmas without a new, or newly reissued “Messiah”? In fact, the recording industry, in a rare fit of collective wisdom, would seem to have decided that enough is enough, that there are a sufficient number of “Messiahs” (Handel’s, that is) to please every taste--for this year, at any rate.

So, those of you who have exercised your option on the subject of “Messiah” recordings for yourselves or as gifts, why not try something different--and, perhaps, even more befitting the season: that thoroughly wonderful and shamefully little-known oratorio by Hector Berlioz, “L’Enfance du Christ” (The Childhood of Christ). The first recorded appearance in a decade originated as the sound track for a 1985 Thames Television production (imagine American commercial TV doing anything comparable!) and comes to us via a small British label called ASV (452, two CDs), distributed in this country by Harmonia Mundi.

“L’Enfance” is hardly for those who dote on Berliozian noise and frenzy. There is no calmer, less insistent composition by the French composer. It is scored for small orchestra, tiny chorus and a half dozen or so vocal soloists who seldom raise their voices beyond a mezzo-forte . This is music of exquisite gentleness, distinguished particularly in the section entitled “The Flight Into Egypt,” with its chaste alternations of long passages for strings alone and winds alone, and the sweetly haunting shepherds’ chorus (of which Brahms was particularly enamored) that gives the lie once and for all to the popular notion of Berlioz as incessantly gluttonous for volume and agitation.

The ASV recording is a musical and sonic triumph. Philip Ledger leads the English Chamber Orchestra and the seraphic John Alldis Choir with the lightest hand possible, yet with firmest rhythmicality. The fine solo contingent features particularly eloquent singing and vocal acting by tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson as the Narrator and bass Richard van Allan as Herod. Highly recommended, for this or any other season.

Berlioz’s “dramatic symphony” “Romeo et Juliette,” the complete work for soloists, chorus and orchestra--as distinct from the familiar orchestral suite--has its detractors, their criticism aimed chiefly at the overlong and pedestrian final scene with its droning Friar Laurence.

In the privacy of one’s home, Friar Laurence can be rendered inaudible, nonexistent, with the lifting of a tone arm or the jiggling of a laser beam. So, the option is yours, the Berlioz instrumental and lyric wonders with or without the Friar’s platitudes, in a pair of state-of-the-art recordings from Riccardo Muti and his Philadelphia Orchestra (Angel 3997, LP or 47437, CD) and from Charles Dutoit and his Montreal Symphony (London 417 302, LP or CD).

Each is a two-disc set, in either format, but London’s is easily the more generous through the inclusion of a 35-minute bonus, Berlioz’s very grand (to some ears impossibly vulgar) “Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale” for a huge brass band, chorus and incidental--read “expendable”--strings. Wagner, it should be mentioned, found it “incomparably noble.”

Muti’s is the bigger, more dramatic “Romeo,” quickly paced and sharply inflected in the action scenes, compact rather than expansive in the reflective and/or amorous ones. Muti has his magnificent Philadelphians playing with an incisiveness, a lean- (but by no mean thin-) toned precision of attack and release that is reminiscent of the very best work of Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, who could, however, never have imagined the prodigies of sound conjured up by the Angel engineers.

London’s equally lucid recording (only the CD was auditioned) reveals an interpretation lighter in both sonic and dramatic weight and less inclined to explosiveness than Muti’s.

Dutoit has this music in his bones and he makes it work on his own, relatively intimate terms. His Tudor Singers are a more refined, more Gallic-sounding lot than Muti’s hearty Westminster Choir, but among the soloists Muti has an insuperable advantage in the presence of Jessye Norman, in most luscious mezzo-soprano fettle, thoroughly outclassing Dutoit’s Florence Quivar, inexpressive and frequently under the note.

Muti’s tenor, John Aler, is thin-toned and monochrome; Dutoit’s, Alberto Cupido, light too, but colorful in tone and textual projection. Between the two tedious Friars, one has a choice of Simon Estes’ ruggedly handsome, linguistically suspect (the language being French) bellowing on Angel and Tom Krause’s more slender, subtly employed instrument accurately projecting score and text.

The reader should also note that more of the magnificent late-1960s, early-’70s Berlioz recordings made by Colin Davis and the London Symphony have been reissued in compact-disc format, the latest being “La Damnation de Faust” (Philips 416 395, two discs), with Nicolai Gedda and Jules Bastin the stylish Faust and Mephistopheles, and a program of overtures (Philips 415 430) highlighted by the spectacular and rarely-encountered “Francs Juges” (Judges of the Secret Court).