Hector Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique

There’s more to this recording than the best funeral bells and the most focused tuba playing on disc in the finale of the Fantastique. Karajan did not record much Berlioz, but like many German conductors he had a special feeling for this particular work. He recorded it three times, once for EMI and twice for DG, the present version being his last and, on balance, most compelling.

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.

Talmi's account offers plenty of interest in any case, even if you're already steeped in performances of the work. This account has plenty of fire and imagination at its best, and at the price it's certainly worth a listen.

‘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.

Maestro Dutoit and his orchestra really make Berlioz' orchestral showpiece glow in all of its colorful splendour, but with enough tenderness and warm lyricism in the more reflective, dreamy parts. But 'Un bal' really sways and swaggers with appropriate grandiloquence. The 'Scene aux champs' is played wonderfully poised and concentrated, but with a lot of warmth as well, helped of course by the mellifluous, wonderfully blended tone of the orchestra.

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.

In 1999, conductor Daniel Barenboim and scholar Edward Said created the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to be a cultural bridge between young Israeli, Arab, and Iranian musicians, and the success of the enterprise has not only raised public awareness of their worthy cause, but also yielded some remarkable recordings. Celebrating the tenth anniversary of the orchestra's formation, Barenboim leads the orchestra in performances of two works linked to the city where the group held its first workshops, Weimar, where associations with Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt are still strong.