La damnation de Faust is a 126-minute studio album of Hector Berlioz's légende dramatique, performed by José van Dam, Malcolm King, Kenneth Riegel, Frederica von Stade and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under the direction of Georg Solti.

[1] The cover art shared by the LP, cassette and CD editions of the album when it was first released is Faust and Méphistophélès by Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), a painting in the Wallace Collection, London.

[1] Alan Blyth reviewed the album on LP in Gramophone in May 1982, comparing it with earlier recordings of La damnation de Faust conducted by Colin Davis[2] and Daniel Barenboim.

[3] Frederica von Stade's Marguerite, he wrote, was sensibly phrased and sounded plausibly youthful, and her "Roi de Thule" was done "simply [and] sweetly".

Although his articulation was inferior to Jules Bastin's for Davis, he had the ideal timbre for the role and sang more beautifully than either the Belgian or Barenboim's "strained" Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

He was triumphant in conjuring up "the empty glory and ... menace of war" in the Hungarian March and "the fever of the score's more energetic passages" in general, and he was on a par with Davis in his acid, ominous Evocation, in the trauma of Marguerite's Romance and in his "care over the peculiar timbre Berlioz [elicited] from his brass and wind".

Until he had heard Solti's discs, he would never have imagined that a recording of the work could give listeners such an overwhelming sense that they were experiencing Berlioz's music from a seat in the orchestra stalls.

Georg Solti's conducting had often been accused of several misdemeanours - a neglect of minutiae, an inadequate grasp of the architecture of the most challenging works and a degree of anonymity.

His handling of Berlioz's "delicate, elfin" sections was "remarkable", and he invested the album's most thrilling passages with a Teutonic seriousness that was fitting for music inspired by Goethe.

"I'm afraid that once again", he wrote, "I was deaf to the faults of Frederica von Stade: the private, haunted tone of the Ballade and the tragic maturity of the Romance seemed to me things of very great beauty".

Kenneth Riegel was a "vividly anxious" Faust with a voice that was undaunted by the challenges of the role's elevated tessitura even if its tone lacked the inherent loveliness of Plácido Domingo's.

Emotional passages were invested with a "sustained depth of feeling", solemn moments with a profundity that had rarely been rivalled and exciting scenes with a "sharpness of rhythm" and a "marvellously taut vitality".

Frederica von Stade, he wrote, was "very subdued" in "Le roi de Thulé", but livened up in her subsequent duet and Romance.

Kenneth Riegel's vocal limitations became impossible to overlook at one or two especially testing moments, but his portrait of Faust was "musical and passionate and [achieved] real heroic-tragic stature".

Record collectors had come to expect exceptionally sound quality from albums that had been taped in Chicago's Medinah Temple, he wrote, and Georg Solti's La damnation de Faust would not disappoint them.

The album's version of the Hungarian March would no doubt be used as a demonstration track by retailers wanting to show their customers what digital recording technology was now capable of.

Solti's conducting was stimulating - he made the Hungarian March "a compulsively exhilarating experience" - but the price of his many thrills was that the score's "wonderful variety of mood and pace and colour" was not served as well as it should have been.