(6 December 1941 - 31 March 2025)
This page is also available in French
Among contemporary conductors John Nelson was one of the leading champions of the music of Berlioz, which he performed over a period of over half a century in his numerous concerts, in North America, Europe and other parts of the world. This short page does not attempt to given an assessment of his achievement for Berlioz, but to gather together an outline of the information provided on this website concerning his work for the French composer. This may be divided into 3 sections: known performances by John Nelson of music by Berlioz from 2003 to 2023; reviews of some of those performances on this site; and recordings by John Nelson of works by Berlioz.
PerformancesThe known performances of Berlioz’s music by John Nelson are collected in chronological order month by month in the section Archive of performances which covers the period from 2003 to (in Nelson’s case) 2024, which represents about two fifths of his whole active career. The listing does not claim to be exhaustive and may contain gaps, but it provides at least a representative sample. The Archive may easily be searched entering Nelson’s name in the dedicated search engine for this section of the site.
The information for the last two decades of his conducting career shows that his Berlioz repertoire was very extensive and comprised most of Berlioz’s major works: it included all three of the operas (Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens, and Béatrice et Bénédict), three of the four symphonies (the Symphonie fantastique, Harold en Italie, and Roméo et Juliette, but not apparently in this period the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, though he did conduct at least one performance of the work on 1 March 1991 at the church of Saint-Eustache in Paris*), occasional performances of Lélio, ou le retour à la vie, either separately or as a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique, the Requiem, Te Deum and l’Enfance du Christ, la Damnation de Faust, the Prix de Rome cantata Cléopâtre, the song cycle Les Nuits d’été and several separate songs, and a number of overtures (Les Francs-Juges, Benvenuto Cellini, Le Corsaire, Béatrice et Bénédict). Few conductors past or present have had such an extensive Berlioz repertoire.
Here is a detailed listing of the works he is known to have performed in this 20 year period, with the number of performances for each work. Included are only complete performances of individual works, not excerpts. For example, the list includes only complete performances of Roméo et Juliette, not the orchestral excerpts which Nelson occasionally performed, though in the case of Berlioz’s works it was clearly Nelson’s preference perform these complete. It will be seen from the list that Nelson conducted performances of Berlioz in almost every year, with the exception of the years 2011, 2013, 2014 & 2018.
Among the major works pride of place in the above list goes to Les Troyens with no less than 27 performances, followed by Les Nuits d’été (15 performances), La Damnation de Faust (11 performances), Harold en Italie (9 performances), the Te Deum and Roméo et Juliette (8 performances each), L’Enfance du Christ and the Symphonie fantastique (6 performances each), Béatrice et Bénédict and Lélio (4 performances each), the Requiem (3 performances) and finally Benvenuto Cellini (2 performances).
* We thank Pierre-René Serna for this information.
ReviewsSeveral of the performances listed in the previous section have received reviews on this site (note that all but one of these are in French):
RecordingsJohn Nelson recorded a large part of his Berlioz repertoire, and was particularly active in the recording studio in his final years, as the following list shows (the links refer to the relevant sections of the Berlioz discography on this site, in which details are provided for each recording):
The most important gaps are the Symphonie fantastique and L’Enfance du Christ.
The Hector Berlioz Website was created by Monir
Tayeb and Michel Austin on 18 July 1997;
Page Berlioz: Pioneers and Champions created on 15 March 2012; this page created on 13 April 2025.
© Monir Tayeb and Michel Austin. All rights reserved.
Back to Berlioz: Pioneers and Champions
Back to Home Page