Symphonie fantastique!

All you need is love! Hector Berlioz couldn’t get the girl of his dreams. So – as you do – he wrote her a symphony: a huge, opium-fuelled riot of passions, nightmares and guillotines (well, you can’t have a good revolution without one). Fantastique by name, fantastic by nature, it’s one of those pieces that you’ve simply got to hear live – and that goes double for Szymanowski’s shimmering dreamscape of the First Violin Concerto, especially when performed by the incomparable Baiba Skride. Vasily Petrenko gets the party started Hungarian-style: in a blaze of fiddles.