Berlioz's Symphonie fantastisque has been astonishing audiences for 181 years and if today we hear it as the work that marked the high tide of 19th-century Romanticism, it's still fascinating to think how an 1836 audience – critics apart – must have received this game-changing opus. Even now, it retains some of its capacity to surprise; the idée fixe that drives the first movement and recurs throughout wasn't an entirely new idea, but Berlioz took it further and in a performance such as this one from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orhcestra under Vasily Petrenko, you get a sense of its history.
The first movement "Rêveries – Passions" had all the elusive (and allusive) persuasiveness of a dream dimly recollected, with the first appearance of the idée fixe, the contrasting moods of vexation and contemplation carefully balanced. There was even an element of Gallic suavity in the way Petrenko led the horns through the central section, no mean feat for a Liverpudlian orchestra conducted by a Russian. The second movement, in which the idée fixe is dressed in a ball-gown, had all the requisite sprightliness, with some fine work from the harps. Sadly, the Scène aux champs is the movement in which the symphony hangs fire and no conductor has ever been able to convince me otherwise: not even the threat of a storm or the recollection of the idée fixe can arrest the becalming effect of this section, altough the RLPO forces did what they could. The final two movements are a different matter entirely and Petrenko and the band marched rousingly to the Scaffold before treating us to a suitably grotesque Witches' Sabbath. A few stray horn fluffs aside, this was as convincing a performance as you're likely to hear anywhere in the UK.