Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique: Live

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This superb recording further confirms, if it were necessary, that performing such music with contemporary instruments, but strings and no vibrato anywhere is far more than an exercise in scholarship.... — BBC Music Magazine, February 2020, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 25th Oct 2019
Catalogue No: HMM902644
Label: Harmonia Mundi
Length: 65 minutes

Record Review

2nd November 2019

Disc of the Week
Gramophone Magazine

December 2019

Recording of the Month
Gramophone Awards

2020

Finalist - Orchestral

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Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Work length53:33

$6.60

$8.25

$9.65

Les Siècles
François-Xavier Roth

1. Rêveries - Passions

Track length14:27

$1.60

$2.00

$2.35

2. Un bal

Track length6:07

$1.00

$1.25

$1.45

3. Scène aux champs

Track length15:32

$1.60

$2.00

$2.35

4. Marche au supplice

Track length6:49

$1.00

$1.25

$1.45

5. Songe d'une nuit de sabbat

Track length10:38

$1.40

$1.75

$2.05

Berlioz: Les Francs-juges Overture, Op. 3

Work length12:12

$1.40

$1.75

$2.05

Les Siècles
François-Xavier Roth

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Drawing on various themes dear to the early Romantic movement of the 1820s, the Symphonie Fantastique turned the rules of a classical symphony on their head - to better serve Berlioz’s intentions.

This new reading by the ensemble Les Siècles is based on a close study of the composer’s autograph score and benefits from an intimate familiarity with period instruments, which here include the church bells of his hometown, La Côte-Saint-André.

The Fantastique includes passages from an early operatic effort he left unfinished: Les Francs-Juges - a piece François-Xavier Roth deems worthy of being placed alongside Berlioz’s more famous symphonic works we cherish today.

Reviews

February 2020

This superb recording further confirms, if it were necessary, that performing such music with contemporary instruments, but strings and no vibrato anywhere is far more than an exercise in scholarship. What the result may lack in weight and density is more than made up for by the gain in clarity and élan. François-Xavier Roth is particularly attentive to the latter, not stinting on the sforzandos.

May/June 2020

There’s an air of lightness and brightness that is very appealing, but it took Roth’s imagination to provide the interpretation that makes everything seem so revealing.Already one can say that this is the best thing to happen to Berlioz since Colin Davis made his reputation with superb recordings of all the major works. Strongly recommended

December 2019

The success of this account is not just through the conductor’s close study of the autograph manuscript. Roth seems to have an emotional hotline to Berlioz, alive to every twist and turn of the composer’s fevered passions.

8th December 2019

it’s a joy to hear French musicians play music that is their birthright. It emerges in brilliant colours, but I miss the flatulent rasp of the ophicleide in the March to the Scaffold. I’ve never heard a witchier finale, though: the woodwinds cackling and the col legno strings clattering to represent skeletons rising from their graves have never been more vividly realised.

1st November 2019

Part of the joy of this studio account of Berlioz’s extraordinary autographical fantasia, made on the back of numerous live concerts, lies in its idiosyncratic instrumental timbres, particularly audible among winds and brass…Yet there’s not only surface brilliance here; Roth clinches the album’s triumph by freshly shaping phrases and dynamics after close inspection of Berlioz’s manuscript...If this performance isn’t “fantastique”, I don’t know what is.

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Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique

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