Collins Classics OFFICIAL – Berlioz (FULL ALBUM)
Fantastique Symphony – Symphonie Fantastique
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0:00 First movement: “Rêveries – Passions” (Reveries – Passions)
13:56 Second movement: “Un bal” (A Ball)
20:15 Third movement: “Scène aux champs” (Scene in the Fields)
36:35 Fourth movement: “Marche au supplice” (March to the Scaffold)
41:09 Fifth movement: “Songe d’une nuit du sabbat” (Dream of the Night of the Sabbath)
Conducted by Louis Fremaux
Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra
You will find bellow, a part of the english text that originally came with the CD. It gives the historical context of this symphony, an idea of the state of mind Berlioz was in at the time of the composition and some explanations of the track in itself.
No composer has excited more divided opinion
than Hector Berlioz. With a passion to match his
own vulcanic flame, you either love or hate him.
A man for neither the faint-hearted nor the
uncommitted, he was one of the grand originals
of the 19th century, an artist of fantasies and
dreams, of liberty and tragedy, of aspiration and
disillusionment, a creative spirit of brilliant, of
turbulent, of poetic, of unhappy impulse, an
innovator of untrammelled vision. Without peer,
he was the great master of the July Monarchy, of
the Second Empire. He changed the course of
musical history. The Romantic Age may have
had its prophets, but it was he gave light to its
soul. His music, Heine said, “has something
primeval about it, if not something antediluvian; it
reminds me of extinct species of animals, or
fabulous kingdoms and fabulous sins, of sky-
storming impossibilities, of the hanging gardens
ot Semiramis, or Nineveh, of the wonderful
constructions or Misrarm“: “a colossal
nightingale, a lark as big as an eagle”. The
Fantastic Symphony, five “episodes de la vie
d‘un artiste”, was first performed at the Paris
Conservatoire on 5 December 183O, a
watershed date, under the direction of Francois-
Antoine Habeneck. In the audience was the
young Liszt, who subsequently was the make an
extraordinary solo piano partition of it (1833).