2009

Keeping Score – Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique

San Francisco Symphony

Join Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony as they follow Berlioz to the brink and beyond in this program, available in DVD or Blu-ray from Keeping Score.

This DVD is part of a laudable outreach and education initiative from the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, taking a number of works and introducing them with an exploratory DVD documentary. What you get here is an hour-long documentary about Berlioz and the context of the music followed by an uninterrupted performance of the work itself.

- Simon Thompson, Music-Web International

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Listen On

“I feel, therefore I am.” For Hector Berlioz, and for the Romantic Movement, those were more than words; they were a song of the heart. But with the unprecedented outpouring of emotion in his Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz almost overpowered Paris. This orchestral sonic spectacular, written to win the heart of a beautiful actress, demanded sacrifice from its author and his audience. From romantic daydreams to deadly displays of devotion, the symphony relates an “episode in the life of an artist,” that artist being the love-obsessed composer himself. This symphony encapsulates the inner drama – and trauma – that made Berlioz one of the masters.

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