TITLE: SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE
COMPOSER: HECTOR BERLIOZ
LABEL: PHILIPS
THE BOTTOM LINE: It's back to the future again with a groundbreaking work on original instruments.
When Berlioz premiered his revolutionary Symphonie Fantastique in 1830, Beethoven had been dead for only three years and Schubert for two. The unsuspecting patrons who gathered at the Paris Conservatory could not have been prepared for the unfettered imaginative brilliance of the 27-year-old composer's work. In this vivid, hallucinatory tale of a lovestruck, opium- poisoned musician, Berlioz practically reinvented the symphonic form (by turning it into the tone poem) and adorned it in a scintillating orchestral raiment...
