Berlioz Carnevale Romano

Paul McCreesh is one of the leading figures in the movement for historically informed performances, and he established his reputation primarily in Renaissance and Baroque music. Yet he is versatile and noted for his varied interests, and he has delved into the Romantic repertoire for this spectacular 2010 recording with Ensemble Wroclaw of Hector Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts.

Not many versions of the Symphonie fantastique rival Myung-Whun Chung’s in conveying the nervously impulsive inspiration of a young composer, the hints of hysteria, the overtones of nightmare in Berlioz’s programme. He makes one register it afresh as genuinely fantastic. Some may well prefer the more direct, more solid qualities that you find in the new Mehta version, also well played, and recorded with satisfying weight, but the volatile element in this perennially modern piece is something which Chung brings out to a degree I have rarely known before, and that establishes his as a very individual, sharply characterized version with unusually strong claims.

The discovery of any "new" large-scale work by Berlioz is bound to kick up excitement in the music world. So it was in 1992 when the manuscript of the long-lost Solemn Mass, composed in 1824, when Berlioz was 20, was unearthed by a Belgian choirmaster in Antwerp. A scholarly edition was quickly prepared, and John Eliot Gardiner gave the first series of performances in five European cities in 1993. It is from one of those live performances, in London's Westminster Cathedral, that this world-premiere recording derives.

On this new period instrument recording of “Les Nuits d’Été” and the symphony “Harold in Italy” by Hector Berlioz, from the award winning musical director Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble, the featured soloists are two of the leading exponents of their art in recent years, the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and the viola player Antoine Tamestit.

‘Muti can suggest a sensibility driven to the edge of sanity by its nightmare,’ wrote Gramophone of this intense interpretation of Berlioz’s visionary Symphonie fantastique, judging it among the finest recordings of the work and praising the conductor’s mastery at ‘holding the thread of argument together firmly, while never minimizing the incidental excitement’.

Immensely influential, the remarkable Symphonie fantastique was composed while Hector Berlioz was suffering an intense and unreciprocated passion for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson. Its autobiographical tale describes a young musician’s opium-poisoned nightmares of jealous despair and fatal justice following the murder of his beloved. Berlioz wrote a second movement cornet solo into a subsequent revision of the score, here included as an optional extra. He wed his sweetheart actress but, recuperating in Nice, wrote Le corsaire after the final break-up of their marriage.

Throughout her fifty year career Barbara Hendricks has shown herself to be one of the greatest champions of French song. This has always held a special place in her repertory and in her heart, as have German lieder, Scandinavian and Spanish songs (not to mention jazz and blues); her musical world has no limits. For this new recording made in 2016, the Swedish soprano pays homage both to her singing teacher and mentor, the great American mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel, and to the creative genius of Hector Berlioz. If the Nuits d’été have long formed part of her repertory, the two cantatas Herminie and Cléopâtre are new.

The large collection of antique instruments at Les Siècles' command makes its recordings more than just speculative period exercises, but something approaching musical time travel. Led since 2003 by its founder, François-Xavier Roth, this singular French orchestra has given thrilling historically-informed recreations of the repertoire of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries on vintage instruments that were available to the musicians of the time, crafted by hand, and possessing the unique sonorities and tunings of different regions.

With the release of this live recording of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, RCO Live celebrates the start of its collaboration with Daniele Gatti as the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's seventh chief conductor on 9 September 2016. His unconventional take on this spectacular score evokes the astonishment audiences must have experienced at the time of the 1830 premiere. It is exactly this sense of surprise and freshness - founded on a thorough knowledge of the score - and the sheer joy of making music together that prompted the members of the RCO to choose Daniele Gatti as their new chief conductor.