Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14 (episodes in the life of an artist)

After a highly successful debut with the London Symphony Orchestra in December 1927, John Barbirolli became the youngest ever conductor to direct a Royal Philharmonic Society concert – he was 29. He chose Debussy’s La Mer, which had not been played in London for ten years. The orchestra needed more time on the unfamiliar score, so Barbirolli paid for an extra rehearsal out of his own pocket; the cost was almost as much as his fee for the whole concert.

Barbirolli continued to serve French music with care and devotion for the rest of his life. At his last concert with the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, in May 1970, he conducted Ravel’s Mother Goose suite. The Symphonie fantastique by Berlioz became a central work in Barbirolli’s repertoire. He conducted it at two important events in the Hallé’s history – the first concert given in the new Free Trade Hall, Manchester in 1951 and then two years later he conducted the work at the Hallé’s first ever Prom concert.

Barbirolli’s classic recording of Symphonie fantastique is now restored to the catalogue along side three pieces from Le Damnation de Faust. A bonus track includes a rehearsal sequence (Menuet des follets) from this recording session.

Although neither man lived in the country at the time, there could be little doubt that Otto Klemperer and Yehudi Menuhin were regarded in the mid 1960s as the UK’s leading ‘resident’ Beethoven performers, even though Menuhin had not taken part in the widely applauded Beethoven cycles that Klemperer and the Philharmonia had initiated in 1957. Indeed it seems that the two artists had not worked together since collaborating on the Schumann Violin Concerto in Los Angeles in November 1938.

The collaboration was much anticipated. The Guardian wrote of ‘the unexpected conjunction of magician and monolith’ and warned that ‘a monolith can be severe to the point of dullness and a magician can sometimes seem to be using the wrong spell-book’.

Its review found, however, that ‘the conjunction began to find its form... the slow movement brought the most ethereal music-making of all, and the finale became a relaxed country dance, something that might almost have fitted in the Pastoral Symphony’.

Klemperer’s association with the Symphonie fantastique may have begun (during one of his periodic depressions) in Berlin in 1928 when, newly chosen as the Kroll Opera’s first music director, he was searching for more radical concert repertoire. The Fantastique did not appeal to him at the time (he probably just read the score without rehearsing or performing it) but he changed his mind rapidly after giving the work in concert in Los Angeles in December 1933 – ‘a work of a hyper-genius’ he told his wife.The Guardian’s 1966 concert review summed up Klemperer’s approach to the Fantastique in relation to the contemporary critical attitude to the work – ‘he pays Berlioz the very just compliment of treating him as a real symphonist and not merely as an atmospheric colorist’. But this is not the pure ‘classical’ interpretation of the score that it’s often portrayed as; rather is it a document of the fascination of one conductor (and a composer and an experienced leader of opera to boot) with radical music.

In 1831 Berlioz extended modern orchestral art with this 'Symphonie Fantastique' which served as a programme model for Mahler and Wagner and later for Debussy's 'La Mer'. Of the 118 recordings since 1930 the models which inspire most are still those of Pierre Monteux and Charles Munch (pace Jean Roy).

The American soprano Eleonor Steber recorded 'Nuits d'été' in 1953 with the blazing support of Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic, the most possessed and convincing version of this masterpiece ever played.

1953 Columbia US [Op. 7], October 1958 [Op. 14]

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 breakup of their marriage.

‘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’. Joining Muti and his Philadelphia forces in the ‘dramatic symphony’ Roméo et Juliette is soprano Jessye Norman, supreme in Berlioz’s vocal music.

In a very short time, Yannick Nézet-Séguin has become one of the most sought-after young conductors in the world, popular with orchestras and audiences alike. Recently named as Music Director Designate of the Philadelphia Orchestra, he succeeded Valery Gergiev as Music Director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in 2008. He is also Chief Guest Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

For the first of four projected discs with BIS, Nézet-Séguin and his Rotterdam players have recorded Hector Berlioz’ masterpiece Symphonie fantastique, in a full-blooded and luxurious performance which at the same time respects the work’s classical proportions

The work is here followed by the ‘lyrical scene’ Cléopâtre (often referred to as La Mort de Cléopâtre), composed shortly before as Berlioz’ entry in the competition for the prestigious Prix de Rome.

Performing the part of Cleopatra is the electrifying soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci in one of her rare appearances on disc.

"He [Yannick Nézet-Séguin] makes the Rotterdam Orchestra sound word-class.” The Times

The Pittsburgh Symphony is an ideal ensemble for Symphonie Fantastique with its huge scoring. This orchestra has previously recorded a Brahms symphony cycle and Strauss’ Alpine Symphony on PentaTone, all of which have been reviewed extremely well.

For Théophile Gautier, the flamboyant figures of Berlioz, Hugo and Delacroix formed a “trinity of Romantic art”. The young Berlioz’s first masterpiece, the Symphonie fantastique, is one of the key works in the history of the Romantic movement and was much admired by Schumann. It was completed and first performed in 1830, and according to the composer it was written “with great difficulty in certain parts, with an incredible facility in others”. Berlioz was then in the throes of an “infernal” passion for a young Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, who he was to marry in 1833. He described the programme of this “instrumental drama” as an evocation of the “reveries” of a young artist who idolises a woman who does not return his love. In despair, he attempts suicide, and then dreams of being present at his own execution after having killed his beloved. The beloved is represented by an “idée fixe”, a kind of leitmotif that crops up in all five movements of the symphony, each of which is conceived as a poem in its own right – to the artist himself (“Rêveries-Passions”), to the dance (“Un bal”), to nature (“Scène aux champs”), to love and to death (“Marche au supplice” and “Songe d’une nuit de sabbat”). The last two movements are truly grotesque, dark and violent – qualities that are highlighted by the strikingly original orchestration. The young hero is led to the scaffold to the accompaniment of the theme of the Dies irae.