How Fantastic

Sir Colin Davis is acknowledged as perhaps the principle living conductors of Berlioz and here he leads the London Symphony Orchestra in the Symphonie Fantastique and Le Carnaval Romain Overture, recordings that in this instance are admittedly forty years old. I said regarding my other Berlioz disk that he was a composer that I had struggled to "get". For those like me, the Symphonie Fantastique is an obvious user friendly starting point with some memorable themes and a clear programmatic path through stories of balls, witches sabbaths, gallows etc. Strangely though, contemporary audiences in Paris at the time of the premiere found it far from user friendly but time lends a distance and expectations change. The orchestrations utilise a large band and the piece had a great influence on some succeeding composers while others fell into the "nay saying" camp. Berlioz himself didn't directly follow the work up with others in a similar vein. The overture here does what an overture is designed to do and provides a fine warm up piece for audience and orchestra without remaining fixed in the memory.