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| Hector Berlioz |
Norrington's are historically informed performances. As the conductor himself wrote about the Symphonie fantastique, "The joys (and tribulations) of playing Berlioz 'historically' affect every aspect then: the score, the instruments, the style, even the layout of the stage." As such his recording was very unlike the ones that that had preceded it, which sometimes seem to take their cue from the work's lurid program, which involves an artist taking opium because of his unrequited love.
This sensational premise - and the scenes that involve a march to the scaffold and a witches' Sabbath - seem to invite or even require Romantic excess in performance. For this reason, I decided to couple Norrington's chaste version with one by the high priest of the Technicolor performance, Leopold Stokowski, leading a modern orchestra. It's quite a contrast.
But before we get to the performances, let's examine the notion that Berlioz himself was a wild-eyed Romantic - even considering the Symphonie fantastique program. First, consider that this symphony postdates Beethoven's Ninth by only six years - 1824 to 1830. Second, Berlioz himself was a famously skilled and fastidious composer and orchestrator. As Wilfrid Mellers has written, the symphony is "ostensibly autobiographical, yet fundamentally classical ... Far from being romantic rhapsodizing held together only by an outmoded literary commentary, the Symphonie fantastique is one of the most tautly disciplined works in early nineteenth-century music."
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| An 1846 caricature of Berlioz - no wonder he was considered a wild-eyed Romantic |
So following the composer's instructions and using an orchestra he would have recognized should lead to revelatory results. And some reviewers found this to be the case following the release of Norrington's recording in 1989.
Stereo Review's Richard Freed wrote, "There's no need to debate whether Berlioz was actually the first great Romanticist or the last great Classicist. The point is that no one understood the orchestra and its instruments better than he did, and it was that profound understanding that enabled him to exploit orchestral color with such unprecedented imaginativeness. That, in brief, would seem to be the basis for Norrington's undertaking - an approach to Berlioz, as to Beethoven, on the composer's own terms - and it turns out to be productive beyond imagining, even more revelatory than his Beethoven performances...
"Before I got to the end I knew that this was the Fantastique that will be the 'basic' recording from now on, and the others will be the alternates."
But that was 35 years ago, and the sound of the modern symphony orchestra is still ascendant. The Norrington approach - while influential - remains the exception rather than the rule. Examine the many "best-of" articles on the Symphonie fantastique and you will find performances by any number of modern orchestras, with at most one "historically informed" reading, usually the one led by Sir John Eliot Gardiner.
Here are today's two recordings.
London Classical Players/Roger Norrington
Norrington and his orchestra recorded the Berlioz work in March 1988 at Abbey Road. As with the Beethoven disc recently heard here, the recorded sound was drab, which undercuts the delights of the composer's scoring as performed by instruments of his time. This is supposition, but perhaps the engineers recorded the orchestra similar to the way they would handle modern orchestras, which generally are much larger and louder than Norrington's forces. I have adjusted the balance accordingly.
Even so, the performance was much appreciated. Here's John Warrack in The Gramophone: "Prepared, and recorded, with the greatest attention to detail, it is a performance of imaginative sweep and excitement, and a record by which future performance of the work will have to be measured."
This transfer comes from a sealed copy of the original vinyl release. The LP had no notes whatsoever, so I have included a PDF of the CD booklet, which includes essays by Norrington and Berlioz expert Hugh Macdonald.
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| Sir Roger Norrington |
LINK to Norrington performance
New Philharmonia Orchestra/Leopold Stokowski
The Symphonie fantastique and its queasy program - which Berlioz later downplayed - would seem to have been made for Leopold Stokowski, one of the most extroverted of 20th century maestros. But somehow he did not record the work until 1968, when he was 83. Decca London provided a multi-miked Phase 4 Stereo production for the occasion.
The results are predictable. Where the harps in the "Un bal" movement sound discreet if delightful for Norrington, for Stoki the single harp is as loud than the rest of the orchestra. Conversely, the orchestral sound at times is quite recessed in a reverberant space (Kingsway Hall), but then a solo flute will suddenly jump to the foreground.
As for the conductor, he is on his best behavior for much of the symphony - unlike a live performance from about the same time that was later released. Harris Goldsmith wrote in High Fidelity: "For the first three movements, Stokowski is really quite restrained. The string tone is, of course, gorgeous and while the playing is always imaginative and full of refined sheen, the tempos and phrasings are not terribly removed from the mainstream of traditional interpretation... In the 'Marche au supplice,' though, Stokowski does adopt a too precipitate approach - one would almost think that the hero in question was attempting to flee justice rather than offering himself as a willing victim to the scaffold... When we arrive at the 'Witches' Sabbath,' however, the conductor really starts substituting LSD for Berlioz' opium." To sum up, Stoki sounds uninvolved until he gets to the juicy parts.
Despite his observations, Goldsmith was positive: "Not my favorite Fantastique perhaps (I prefer the Davis version on Philips), but an attractive and stimulating one, nonetheless."
I'll leave it to you to decide which one is better - Stokowski or Norrington.
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| Leopold Stokowski |
LINK to Stokowski performance
