Berlioz Works

Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform works by Berlioz, Deubssy, and Ravel. A WGBH live broadcast from the Sanders Theater, Harvard University on 17 April 1962.

Composed in 1824 by Hector Berlioz at the age of twenty-one and premiered at the church of Saint-Roch in Paris in 1825, the Messe solennelle has come down to us following an eventful history. After Berlioz declared that he had destroyed the score, the mass was considered lost until it was rediscovered in Antwerp in 1992. This remarkable work helps us both to appreciate the development of Berlioz’s style – already revolutionary in his early years – and to understand what he owed to his contemporaries, notably Cherubini, whose monumental Requiem Hervé Niquet has already recorded (Alpha 251).

Of all Berlioz’s Shakespeare-inspired works, Roméo et Juliette is unquestionably his masterpiece. It is also cast in an innovative new form, a kind of ‘super-symphony’ that incorporates elements of symphony, opera and oratorio. Berlioz composed no singing roles for the central characters, but allowed others to comment or narrate, giving latitude to incarnate the lovers in a musical language of extraordinary delicacy and passion. The vivid Ball Scene and Romeo at the Capulet tomb are intensely dramatic but the heart of the work is the Love Scene, a long symphonic poem which Richard Wagner called ‘the melody of the 19th century’.

The BR-KLASSIK label is now taking the 75th anniversary of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) in 2024 as an opportunity to make previously unreleased recordings of concerts that are worth listening to available on CD and as a stream for the first time. Hector Berlioz's passionate "Symphonie fantastique", the almost revolutionary symphonic masterpiece by the great French composer, was performed by Colin Davis with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra at Munich’s Philharmonie im Gasteig on January 15 and 16, 1987.

Symphonie fantastique: Épisode de la vie d'un artiste … en cinq parties (Fantastical Symphony: Episode in the Life of an Artist … in Five Sections) Op. 14, is a program symphony written by the French composer Hector Berlioz in 1830. It is an important piece of the early Romantic period.

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony bring unsurpassed storytelling and musicality to their latest recording on the Grammy Award-winning SFS Media label: Berlioz’s dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette. With a narrative that Berlioz deemed “too beautiful, too musical” to not be performed, this impassioned orchestral scoring of love and despair is further enriched by the vocals of Sasha Cooke, Nicholas Phan, Luca Pisaroni, and the SFS Chorus.

Internationally acclaimed "baritenor" Michael Spyres commands parts for high tenor as well as baritone with the same fulminance and nonchalance - in both registers he has "the operatic world at his feet," Gramophone Magazine raved.