Classical music | Preview
Hector Berlioz gave his Symphonie fantastique a plot worthy of a fever dream. A young artist falls violently in love, wanders through scenes of mounting obsession, imagines his own execution and finally encounters his beloved transformed into a figure at a witches’ gathering. The extraordinary thing is that he made the orchestra tell the story.
On November 5, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s brings the symphony to Carnegie Hall. The piece is nearly two centuries old, but its central trick remains startlingly modern: an idée fixe, a melody associated with the artist’s beloved, returns in altered forms as his imagination deteriorates. Its transformations invite listeners to recognize a person even as the music renders her increasingly strange.
Berlioz composed the work in 1830, when a five-movement orchestral symphony that ended in a grotesque Sabbath was hardly a safe proposition. He summoned bells, unusual instrumental colors and startling rhythmic effects to give subjective experience a physical force. The result can be wonderfully excessive, but the extravagance is not incidental. The excess is the subject.
At its best, a performance of the Fantastique makes that extravagance sound carefully calculated. The pastoral movement needs enough quiet to make the later violence register; the march to the scaffold is all the more disturbing for its brisk certainty. A conductor cannot simply turn up the volume and hope the nightmare takes care of itself.
For an orchestra named after a New York church, the engagement is a reminder that the city’s classical life is not confined to its largest institution. The Orchestra of St. Luke’s has long occupied a distinct place in the concert landscape, moving between chamber-scale clarity and expansive orchestral repertory. Berlioz asks it to do both, sometimes within the same phrase.
Performance: November 5, 8 p.m., Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, Carnegie Hall. Carnegie Hall calendar.
Carnegie Hall. Photograph: Epicgenius / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
