Restoring The Fantasy

By Michael Walsh

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 that other composers later matched but never surpassed for sheer originality.

It is impossible for modern listeners to recapture the sense of wonder and amazement with which those audiences heard the work. Liszt, Ravel, Richard Strauss and a host of other orchestral sorcerers have seen to that. But what if the Symphonie Fantastique were heard not on modern instruments but on period instruments? On 18th century natural horns and trumpets, on the serpent and the ophicleide? Such is the premise behind conductor John Eliot Gardiner's recording with the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique. The result is the next best thing to having been there.

Recorded in the same hall in which it was premiered, this Symphonie Fantastique goes well beyond curiosity value, evoking the sheer joy of rediscovering Berlioz's extraordinary sonorities and piquant harmonies. Details that are often lost in modern performance stand out in bas-relief: the cascading harps in the ball scene, or the spooky passage in the witches' sabbath where the violins briefly play with the wood of their bows instead of the hair. Best of all is the optional cornet part in the ball, a biting commentary that gives the great dance scene even more propulsion than before.

The original-instruments movement has been decried by some as a desperate attempt to say something new about a stagnant repertoire. But the proof is in the listening, and here is Berlioz in all his experimental, raucous glory. At last the fantasy has been put back into the Fantastique. Next: Liszt's Faust Symphony anyone?