Yet Another Post about Authenticity in Bach

 There are three topics you never mention in polite conversation:

1. Religion

2. Politics

3. Which instruments to play Bach?

Short of atonality and woke questions, there is absolutely nothing that gets music people in a snit faster than issues of authentic performance practice.

On the one hand, there is no question in my mind that when it comes to Bach, the HIP movement has gone badly off the rails. There is no need for, as more than one person put it here, 'sowing machine tempi' that were clearly beyond the competence of what most instrumentalists were said to be capable of in Bach's day. There is no point for virtuoso runs to go by at light speed when you can't hear what the notes are. I can understand lots of improvisatory ostentation and bravado in Handel or Vivaldi, but in Bach? Bach would have thrown the singers out of the organ loft. The idea of doing an 'authentic' Mass or a Passion with one-per-a-part is so completely outrageous - even if the singer can be heard over the trumpets (doubtful), all it would take in a polyphonic movement is the mistake of one singer, and the entire ensemble could go off the rails.

Bach is meant to be austere, his knowledge of musical trends in Italy and France was entirely abstract, and anything which smacked of decadence was antithetical to his puritanical worldview. Bach is a cathedral, every note matters as much as an architectural brick. He is a 17th century celestial machine, like a grandfather clock. The miracle of Bach is that his music is pure mechanics, and yet every musical gear has infinite emotion.

BUT! Here's the thing about HIP, it arrived in response to obvious problems. There's a reason that Bach and Handel were considered just an occasional sideshow in a performance season: the reason is that the instruments and techniques were designed for music written 150 years later. For all our fond memories of Karl Richter and company, most choruses couldn't sing baroque music very well, most orchestras sounded badly balanced, and there was no way for 2-3 hour performances of unvarying solemnity not to try the attention span.

So in retrospect, the Harnoncourts and Leonhardts were the side of right, it's the Gardiners and Koopmans who were not. With the potential exceptions of Herreweghe and van Veldhoven, the next generation put the HIP forces on the same sort of excess and addictions. But rather than bloat in the name of profundity, we got virtuosity in the name of passion, and there is a direct line of descent from Gardiner and Koopman to the anomie of McCreesh and Minkowski. However excellent all four can be in other music, they're no Bachians. We won't even get started with how strange Bach has gotten in recent years....

There are exceptions in both directions, there are always exceptions. If you can't hear the appeal of Jochum in Bach, I feel sorry for you, but if you don't get the appeal of Bach when done by Mazaaki Suzuki, I feel equally sorry. Both approaches may fall definitively on one side of the HIP debate, but they find ways around it to capture Bach in both his grandeur and his intimacy.

But like with Mozart, there seemed to arrive a 'golden generation' for Bach born around the 1920s and 30s that synthezied the best of old and new, and they were on either side of the HIP ledger: Harnoncourt, Rilling, Leonhardt, Ericson, Bruggen, Corboz, Peter Schreier when he conducted... what made them mostly unique in the strange cult of Bach performance was that they were not encumbered by questions of style. They realized the value of both approaches, and consequently could probe for content as few have before or since. It is impossible to capture the meanings of this music unless you're willing to both have the warmth which a genuine string section allows for, and also the clarity which you can only get from keeping the orchestra smaller than one you use for later music.

But then, there's the Thomanerchor, year in year out, beholden to the unbroken tradition of sound that goes back half-a-millenium before Bach himself. Whatever the stylistic preferences of its cantor, there is that sound, the only true ring of authenticity in Bach, from which you can hear a sound that plausibly fits Bach's counterpoint like a glove.

Here they are under their former cantor, Georg Christoph Biller not too long before his sad retirement and passing due to a neurological disease. There are two B-Minor Masses (sic) on youtube. One from the beginning of his tenure, one from near the end. The first with the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the second Freiburger Barockorchester. The first is very good, but this is greatness. By this time he'd been working with them for sixteen years, and it has that incisive authority of a director who'd long shaped his ensemble and get exactly what he wants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCWMUt0KmY4

This is Bach.

ONL - Tales of Classical Perversion: The First Aristobulus and Antigonus - rewrite

 Fall 129 BC, 625 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3633

1. The death of Antiochus VII Sidetes was followed by precisely what Antiochus the Pious predicted to Hyrcanus. Antiochus's two sons, also named Antiochus, plunged Sellucid Greece into civil war, which quickly became civil massacre, as two rival brothers claimed the throne in quick succession, each alleging the other a Pretender.

 

129-109 BC, 625-645 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3433-3453

 

2. Upon reaching the throne, each son encountered further insurrection from their supporters. Many of the Greek Court, having supported Antiochus's older son, Antiochus VIII Grypus, rebelled quickly against him after installation so they might support a claim of Grypus's own son, Sellucus VI Epiphanes. Grypus's younger brother, Antiochus IX Cyzicenus, encountered insurrection from his mother and lover, Cleopatra Thea, previously wife to both Antiochus VII Sidetes and his predecessor, Dmitrius II Nicator. During ten years that followed, each would overthrow the other multiple times every year and occasionally two would attempt to lead as co-rulers, only for collaboration to collapse immediately.

 

3. Hyrcanus, seeing the Greek territory that formerly belonged to Israel, set about reconquering parts of Syria, including the entire Madaba region across the Jordan River, the city of Shechem - sometimes referred to as Nablus, and the Mountain of Gerizim. He made war further against the Idumeans, Samaritans, and Cuthians - a tribe of Babylonian colonists settled upon the Jordan River's West Bank. His greatest achievement is widely regarded as the 'Sack of Sebastia', the Idumean capital, which Hyrcanus's army laid to cinder.

 

108 BC, 646 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3454

 

4. The true achievement at Sebastia belongs however to the generalship of Hyrcanus's two eldest sons: Judas, nom-de-guerre Aristobulus, and Matthias, nom-de-guerre Antigonus - hereafter known by their war names, who so incinerated the city that starving survivors were said to feast upon deceased flesh for twenty years thereafter. Without consultation of Hyrcanus, the sons insisted upon forcing the conversion of all Idumeans with all consequent circumcisions. When Hyrcanus heard of their action, he admonished them to 'beware the leaven of conversion.'

 

5. We must pause to mention a story, possibly apocryphal, of an Idumean boy who came upon the desert convoy of Aristobulus and Antigonus to beg. The boy explained that for three weeks he'd lived only upon his own leavings. Aristobulus and Antigonus explained they would give food if he pledged himself to the Jewish faith and seal his covenant with a circumcision. The boy replied 'I will do first, understand later.' This boy's name was Antipater, who later became Antipater the Idumean, founder of the Herodian Dynasty, Governor of Idumea, valued advisor and minister to a pendulum of Hasmonean Liberators, all the while positioning his issue to inherit a Judean client state controlled by Rome rather than Greece.

 

104-103 BC, 650-651 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3458

 

6. Aristobulus, elder of Hyrcanus's two favored sons, became Fifth Liberator upon his father's death. Immediately he ordered imprisonment of his mother and three other brothers in the darkest cells of Kishle, the still infamous prison of Jerusalem. Two of the other brothers were never seen again and within a fortnight his mother, Alexandra Jannea, died of starvation. The historian Eusebius Polymocretes of Aleppo writes that Aristobulus burned his father's will because Hyrcanus left the office of Liberator to his wife, their mother.  According to Eusebius Polymocrates, Hyrcanus was greatly distressed with Idumea's forced conversion, for it brought into Judea an enemy swearing revenge from within; and fearing the ruthless stupidity of his sons he secretly machinated to pass them over.

 

7. Both Flavius Josephus and the Book of Maccabees refer to the 'tender passion' of Aristobulus for Antigonus, and tell also of Aristobulus's cerebral hemorrhages, after which Aristobulus required Antigonus to be conquering general in his stead; from which Antigonus's wife planted the seed of a labyrinthine plot to assassinate Antigonus. However, Eusebius Polymocrates states that Aristobulus was not married, and that such tender passion was not only consummated, but that Aristobulus was no general at all but rather a poet/musician in the manner of Nero, and divided the Liberator's job between that of civil governance and High Priest so that Antigonus might be simultaneously named High Priest, General, and the Liberator's consort; and therefore the Pharisees were scandalized by their Liberator's Hellene licentiousness and corruption. According to Eusebius Polymocrates's Chronicle of Antique Infamies, Antigonus returned to Jerusalem to a parade of triumph, and immediately afterward was stabbed by incensed Pharisee conspirators in the Temple. When Antigonus saw what became of his brother and consort, he stabbed himself next to Antigonus's body so that their blood might mingle in death.

Zinman's Nutcracker

 Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake belong to Russia, but The Nutcracker belongs to America. There's no country where The Nutcracker means more than the US, where every parent has to go watch their daughter dance the part of 'little snot #3' in their local production of The Nutcracker, and for some reason, every girl takes ballet here from the time they're four years old until they're nine, then never have anything to do with ballet again until they take their own kids.

The Nutcracker was even considered marginal Tchaikovsky until George Balanchine's New York City Ballet production of the Nutcracker in 1954. Sure, people knew about it, but probably under the name "Shchelkunchik." It was no more important than, say, the Mozartiana Suite. It was only when the New York City Ballet played it every Christmas that it became the ballet among all ballets.

I doubt either Bolshoi or Mariinsky has accumulated the yearly number of performances done by the New York City Ballet in the years since. Here's their orchestra's recording, done for a movie version they did in the early nineties that starred, believe it or not, Macaulay Culkin (the brat in Home Alone). It was conducted by David Zinman, who in the nineties was one of the greatest conductors in the world. If the NYCB orchestra was at all lacking in comparison to major orchestras before facing Zinman, there's no way you can tell here. If you didn't know any better you'd think it was Cleveland under Dohnanyi.

I don't know what the greatest recording is of The Nutcracker, but this is my favorite. You hear everything, you get closer to Tchaikovsky's tempo markings than most any other, you completely feel the rhythmic spring of the dance without tempi so fast that the notes feel scrambled, and there is no lack of passion in the climaxes. It is Tchaikovsky close to the world of his idols: Mozart and Schumann, and shows that at his greatest, Tchaikovsky was fully their equal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3K7k2slTSs&list=PLUtjANhAH1uEfi05xkGKfvc6KHaUs5LGi&index=1&fbclid=IwAR3HAnsw-0GuA1lQxt2spQrwy-WUgNiGZqIdeIfDPQKnP1_Gf7-z5KQzT3Q

Adolphus Hailstork and the problem of 'White Choral Music'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZX_t_r2z4g

So far as I know, I think Adolphus Hailstork is our greatest African-American musical master. Still is an absolute master too, I love Florence Price's chamber music even if I don't hear the appeal in her symphonies, but as a personal preference, I click on Hailstork a lot more often.

Just listen to this ten minutes of choral music. I obviously have more complex thoughts about viewing art through identity's prism than most people allow for in 2022; but if you want to understand why lived identity is genuinely of paramount importance in the arts, compare Hailstork's bold and beautiful originality to the shitty ninth-chord white bread we get from so many American composers who dine out on making the choral music equivalent of Kenny G.

Black choral composers and arrangers have provided a glory of this country for literal hundreds of years. But every Christmas classical scenesters have to hear this 'smooth-chorus' shite somewhere that only a WASP could love, and the amount of money Whitacre and Lauridsen make should be considered a war crime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdvnp6GGuMM

Abbado's Misdeeds

 https://forbiddenmusic.org/2018/08/01/a-quarter-century-since-the-death-of-berthold-goldschmidt/?fbclid=IwAR0SkyM-Ml9moBcci4Bib3RfBy1HLJdayH6wlX7-xQl41MdhzGZTfzslZ0I

No way I'm putting a link to this on twitter....

This blogpost, buried in the internet's neither region, is absolutely essential reading, and not just for the reason it seems.

We're gonna talk abundantly about Berthold Goldschmidt here before long, one of the great figures of 20th century music, but more importantly, we have to talk about what this says about Claudio Abbado, buried long into the post's second half, and what it says of his treatment of women and gay people, which is both surprising and unsurprising.

It's left somewhat ambiguous, but clearly Abbado, like so many conductors, was a terrible womanizer. Whatever happened behind closed doors, it leaves in no uncertain terms that something about it was abusive. It goes without saying that he abused his position to get sexual favor, but in the world pre-2017, there generally had to be something more for people to take special note. Was part of it that they were ghosted without warning or gratitude? Quite likely given Abbado's penchant for passive aggression. Was it that he was physically abusive? I frankly can't see that happening. Obviously anything is possible, but Abbado had, by so many accounts, no real temper. Abbado's producer calls him 'misogynist', I think it likely that he means Abbado was sexually abusive. 'Misogynist' was the label often bandied about for President Kennedy, and what we soon found out was the implication that JFK forced them to endure deeply humiliating and painful acts with the barest hint of consent.

In addition, Abbado apparently did not want this writer as his recording producer because the producer was gay. Given Abbado's reputation as a real humanist, I obviously find this rather hypocritical. One expects such behavior from notorious jerks like Dutoit and Maazel, even Barenboim, but you don't expect it from Abbado.

There's another source in a comment section that links to this article which states that as Abbado aged and underwent terrible illness, he made some acts of repentance, I believe that too, though I have no idea what they were, nor do I know if they were sufficient to his actions.

I'm going to play Devil's Advocate. There's a term on the internet for people who excuse the behavior of the powerful called 'himpathy', which excoriates anybody who would try to explain away men who abuse their positions. That term is... no nice way to say it... it's stupid. It's counterproductive. It's turned everything it touches into disaster. Even when people stand to lose everything, pathologically abusive acts proliferate until the sources of the pathology are located. There is no misdeed in exposing abusive behavior, but to attempt the rewrite people's histories, both personal and political, as simple stories of abuse without examining the abuse's causes is the behavior of emerging totalitarian movements: Marxism, Jacobinism, Lutheranism, it happens in history once every hundred and change years, it is encoded in the world's DNA that revolutionaries demand too much of people, and in turn provoke the deadliest possible counterrevolutionaries, who then revolutionize soft social justice movements into movements of the most hardened murderers. The result is always so much more devastating than 'mere' abuse.

We are not going to stop the bad behavior of celebrities until there is no longer such a thing as a celebrity. It's encoded in the DNA of power, and the powerful will always find new ways to abuse people and keep their abuses secret. What is the advance of the Trump wing of the Republican party but traditional notions of celebrity fighting back? The most hated celebrity in America was elected President, and two years after he left the job, he still isn't even indicted for his highest or lowest crimes.

Abbado? I'm not going to explain it by saying he's Italian or of the 60's/70's generation. Just as with Bernstein, there was always something about his persona that seemed 'off' from what was presented. No authority figure is that meek and gentle. Power corrupts, and I do not trust any person whose life seems too well put together, let alone leaders. Abbado was the founder of something like half-a-dozen apprentice orchestras for recent graduates beginning their careers. 90% of celebrities do not give back on that level of generosity without indulging themselves some exploitative recompense for it, however good their intentions at the outset.

As for any homophobia, well... that strikes me as ugly but just a little bit more complicated than it seems. It strikes me as less a gut instinct than a double standard. The world of the arts is always a complicated place. In the period Abbado came up, Benjamin Britten broke off relations and torpedoed careers as a matter of course, the US was recovering from Virgil Thomson's and Howard Taubman's consistent vindictiveness in print that set back hundreds of musicians, Italy was just acclimating itself to how Franco Zefferelli and other directors expected sexual quid pro quos for favors in the opera world, and Herbert von Karajan - almost unquestionably bisexual and surrounded by gay sycophants - deliberately sabotaged the careers of performers who refused his offers and orders, to say nothing of the actions perpetrated by the other most powerful opera conductor of Abbado's generation.... But there is no question that their vituperation was partially brought on by the discrimination and humiliations these men endured, and it ignores how many powerful straight artists did exactly the same thing - probably many more.

Personally, when I watch any person whose life seems well put together try to chastise misdeeds too flagrantly, I just assume they're hiding something themselves. Whatever their agenda, there are inevitably reasons which draw people to invective like moths to flame - some of which are deeply selfish. I have met so many people who are deliberately unforgiving about issues of justice - people of the left and right, and inevitably, there are deep personal holes and hypocrisies in their behaviors. Some are merely hypocrites, some misdeeds are vastly more serious.

But as all these movements from intersectionality to even metoo and Black Lives Matter continue to run their course, these movements are looking increasingly ugly, and I grow increasingly impatient about holding my tongue just to keep my personal relations running smoothly.

In my own life, career and romantic prospects be damned, I refuse to pretend that beneath my invectivized facade of dysfunction is not more dysfunction and still more dysfunction even underneath that - it's dysfunction all the way down. What does it matter to say so out loud? Nobody but friends and acquaintances know who I am, and likely won't for a long time. Some may think differently, but I don't think my life story is worse than a person with deep problems doing what people with deep problems do. I believe that one day, all the writing and music people ignored from me at my time of doing it will get at least some exposure and understanding, and in the meantime, trying to posture in a way that has a 1% chance of advance any career prospects just gets in the way of creating meaningful things. I believe that however long and violent the results of internet panic, it will eventually have no choice but to subside, and the world will have to become somewhat be more forgiving. Anyone with a shred of decency tries to be worthy of people's love and trust, and anybody with a shred of humanity consistently fails.

Claudio Abbado was arguably the most powerful conductor in the entire history of the profession. He was, fundamentally, a decent guy somewhat spoiled by fame, and he did what people spoiled by power do. None of this should surprise anybody. The powerful will always find ways to 'inflict their power' without thought as to what they're doing. It's part of the human story, it will always be part of the human story, and the human story will always be told from new angles. There is not a single action in the world without consequences unintended. Those who try to control the narrative of 'what happened' - be they the establishment or people trying to overthrow the establishment, will inevitably fail, and their failures are, quite literally, human history.

An Irrational Complaint

 I'm too much of a coward to put this in my feed, but I need to vent my rage somewhere about the Sight and Sound movie list. It's the only critical event I ever look forward to. Nothing surprises me anymore, and yet this did. The idea that Jeanne Dielman can be acclaimed as the greatest movie of all time by the world's greatest experts: I don't know what to call it but a disgrace... Why was it chosen? Well, look up the director...

On the one hand, I find most arguments against more diverse representation to be absolutely loathesome things. I want no part in them, I want nothing to do with people who advance them, I see the people on my side of this argument, and it fills me with hatred and misery. It is a conscienceless maintenance of a status quo that keeps billions of people crushed under history's wheel until they repay what's done to them, defended by reactionaries too stupid to see that they by defending things as they are they're only signing their own death warrants.

And they have so provoked the revolutionary class that the past has now been rewritten as nothing more than a wholesale oppression by white men of the rest of the world. The rewriting of the past to suit the intersectional values of the present is a totalitarian impulse that could kill literal billions - values most people hadn't even heard of ten years ago! It has lead my country to the brink of civil cataclysm - and not a single person of influence on my side of the political spectrum has been brave or introspective enough to examine our own role in it. And now, we have to lock step with any and all politicizing of art - which is inevitably politicized to fit only one rubric.

The way out of all this is the humanities. It has always been the humanities. It will always be the humanities. Science is value neutral, but the contemplation of life is what got us out from underneath nature, from underneath god, and god willing will one day get us out from underneath social pseudo-science. There is literally no space for art anymore without the interference of the most unsubtle, blatant version of politics. Art is the best tool we have to help us understand politics, but a thousand times in history, politics proved to us its extreme unfitness to help us understand art.

This lock step is going to create such a backlash for the very people it's supposed to help. Take it from this unknown Jew who's trying to write a very long and overly ambitious novel of Jewish oppression: if the price of greater respect for Jews from the mainstream world was the Shoah, I don't think it's been worth it for us. If immediate greater approbation for minorities means that white males put mass numbers of them to death, how can that possibly be worth its price to the very people trying hardest to advance this cause? What good is it to prove yourselves right about how terrible white males are if the only people left are white males?

Covid restrictions in China do not mean what they mean here.

 If the Chinese covid numbers really and truly are lower than in the US (and occasionally I have my doubts), it's because of China's zero covid policy. The zero covid policy means absolute quarantine. No one is permitted to leave their houses, sometimes including the emergency workers who are supposed to respond, from a date sprang on the population until a date the ban is arbitrarily lifted. Anyone who violates the zero covid policy will be captured on China's billion street cameras and could result in very long term prison terms. Any criticism or record of abusive repression is immediately erased by the government from the internet.

All of this of course is happening while Xi Xinping is consolidating power to become the lifetime dictator of China and is militarizing the country to an unprecedented extent. The Chinese people are at least as scared of war with us as we are of war with them, and yet, where are our anti-war voices? Where is our solidarity? Where are the protests against a power that can abuse and has abused more human rights than any government on earth?

The answer, of course, is nowhere, because that involves admitting that someone can abuse human rights who isn't backed by the US government.

Randy Newman's Faust

 My favorite American singer-songwriter made a musical version of Faust in the 90s that nobody knows about. One day I'll do a long piece on my weird love of Randy Newman - a love that I pretty much have all to myself. Everybody but me finds him insipid. I'm in that weird substrata of the Anglophone world that thinks he's something close to a genius.

Let's face it.... the level of musical and poetic invention in most pop music is not great, to say nothing of the singing... The difference between Randy Newman and the rest of them is

1. The quasi-operatic pretensions of rock are gone. The pretension is not particularly endearing when opera does it either, and Randy Newman strips away the varnish. He is about as far from a 'rock god' as a rockstar gets.Once you leave the production and high-tech behind, you're left with colloquial rhymes, unsophisticated harmonies, sung by people with bad voices. The difference is that Randy Newman's songs are quite a bit more sophisticated - harmonically, poetically, and thematically. Another reason people don't like him is that his influences go into the uncool parts of American music - Ragtime, Dixieland, Tin Pan Alley, Brill Building, and first generation R&B. Can't do much about the voice though... which is as bad as anyone's on the planet.
2. Because Randy Newman is an 'everyman', there is no pretense around how colloquial his music is. It sounds much less sophisiticated than, say, the Stones or Clapton, but it's in fact quite a bit more. This is an artist who's also a deep social critic, whose harmonies and arrangements (many of which he does himself) are incredibly sophisticated by rock music standards, and while other rock gods let us avoid the human condition, Newman steers us straight into life's tragicomic river.
3. From the beginning of his career, Newman was an adult while his contemporaries were still children, and they're still playing at children as they get to eighty. Newman realizes that life itself is tragicomic, and his music reflects the richness of emotional experience that can make us laugh as easily as it can make us cry. Like Mozart or Brahms, Newman is not trying to get our adrenaline pumping, he's trying to equalize our emotional temperature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VvSjvljbLs&list=PLWZBlPcT9yJirckM1JpsU6dm8he96dRPP&index=    

Otterloo's Fantastique

 Willem van Otterloo left two Symphonie Fantastiques that are as good as anyone has ever done them. One is with the Berlin Philharmonic, and of course that one is great, but this from eight years later is better. It's very nearly as well played, and those recent Nazis do not have the warmth or lyricism these Dutch present. It's absolutely beautiful.

Otterloo has a conception not unlike Cluytens (studio) or Beinum, but it's fierier. The Berlin version would remind anyone of how someone like George Szell might have done the Fantastique - everything is precise, accented, almost regimented. The inevitable regimentation is pretty much all that keeps the Berliner recording from being mentioned in the same breath as the M's - Markevitch (Lamoreux) Munch, Monteux, (and Davis if you like that sorta thing...).

The Hague Philharmonic is not the Berlin Philharmonic. Even in 1951, expecting other orchestras to play on the Berliner level is unrealistic. When a conductor asks for it, even the Philharmoniker during the Celibidache/Furtwangler years could produce unmatched clarity, precision, and lightness in addition to weight. What they could not do, and still cannot, is make you forget that they are an Orchestra with a Capital O. There is a kind of vanity in certain of the great orchestras, who patrol their native sound like vultures, and as such, the sound matters to them more than the music. Being the most gifted musician in the world is not the same as being the best - and the great musician of ordinary gifts often sees much further because they have to experience music the way the rest of us do - as servants to it rather than masters.

By any standard but Berlin, the amount of virtuosity on display here is astonishing. Listen to 'the E-Flat Clarinet from Hell' in the last movement, try not to gasp at the force with which they attack the March to the Scaffold. But you also get a sincerity of expression you almost never get from Berlin. Just listen to that cantabile all through the first two movements - it's Kreislerian, Kubelikian, Pattian... these are simple human beings making music that's about love, obsession, mental illness, horror, fun, and drugs....

There are different ways of playing this amazingly. You can make it into a Bacchanal like Munch or Cluytens when he did it live, you can dramatize the ideas like Bernstein, you can make it into a modernist commentary like Markevitch and Silvestri that point up every innovation, or you can make it into a virtuoso concerto for orchestra (pick any slick modern maestro...). And yet very few among the hundreds of Fantastqiues are of a musicality that's worthy of comparison to Monteux - maybe Cluytens, Jansons, Bruno Walter, Rozhdestvensky, Beinum, and this one. This is the work of real musical mastery - not the vain kind that shows off endless technical feats, but a humane music that expresses avec amour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgkQgcNl0jc

Who's Gonna Lead the Revolution - Part 2

 For this part I'll cede the floor completely to Jacques Barzun:

"How a revolution erupts from a commonplace event---tidal wave from a ripple---is cause for endless astonishment. Neither Luther in 1517 nor the men who gathered at Versailles in 1789 intended at first what they produced at last. Even less did the Russian Liberals who made the revolution of 1917 foresee what followed. All were as ignorant as everybody else of how much was about to be destroyed. Nor could they guess what feverish feelings, what strange behavior ensue when revolution, great or short-lived, is in the air.

First, a piece of news about something said or done travels quickly, more so than usual, because it is uniquely apt; it fits a half-concious mood or caps a situation: a monk questions indulgences, and he does it not just out of the blue---they are being sold again on a large scale. The fact and the challenger's name generate rumor, exaggeration, misunderstanding, falsehood. People ask each other what is true and what it means. The atmosphere becomes electric, the sense of time changes, grows rapid; a vague future seems nearer.

On impulse, perhaps to snap the tention, somebody shouts in church, throws a stone through a window, which provokes a fight---it happened so at Wittenberg---and clearly it is no ordinary breach of the peace. Another unknown harrangues a crowd, urging it to stay calm---or not to stand there gaping but do something. As further news spreads, various types of people become aroused for or against the thing now upsetting everybody's daily life. But what is that thing? Concretely: ardent youths full of hope as they catch the drift of the idea, rowdies looking for fun, and characters with a grudge. Cranks and tolerated lunatics come out of houses, criminals out of hideouts, and all assert themselves.

Manners are flouted and customs broken. Foul language and direct insult become normal, in keeping with the rest of the excitement, buildings are defaced, images destroyed, shops looted. Printed sheets pass from hand to hand and are read with delight or outrage---Listen to this! Angry debates multiply about thigns long since settled: talk of free love, of priests marrying and monks breaking their vows, of property and wives in common, of sweeping out all evils, all corruption, all at once---all things new for a blissful life on earth.

A curious leveling takes place: the common people learn words and ideas hitherto not familiar and not interesting and discuss them like intellectuals, while others neglect their usual concerns---art, philosophy, scholarship---because there is only one compelling topic, the revolutionary Idea. The well-to-do and the "right-thinking," full of fear, come together to defend their possessions and habits. But counsels are divided and many see their young "taking the wrong side." The powers that be wonder and keep watch, with fleeting thoughts of advantage to be had from the confusion. Leaders of opinion try to put together some of the ideas afloat into a position which they mean to fight for. They will reassure others, or preach boldness, and anyhow head the movement.

Voices grow shrill, parties form and adopt names or are tagged with them in derision and contempt. Again and again comes the shock of broken friendships, broken families. As time goes on, "betraying the cause" is an incessant charge, and there are indeed turncoats. Authorities are bewildered, heads of institutions try threats and concessions by turns, hoping the surge of subversion will collapse like previous ones. But none of this holds back that transfer of power and property which is the mark of revolution and which in the end establishes the Idea.

The seizure by Henry VIII of England's abbeys and priories, openly in the name of reform and morality, is notorious. But this secularizing of church property went on during the 16C in every other country except Italy and Spain. During this transfer, treaties were made every few years to confirm or reverse the grab, as the forturnes of war dictated. To the distant observer the course of events is a rushing flood; to those inside it is a whirlpool.

Such is, roughly, how revoutions "feel." The gains and the deeds of blood vary in detail from one time to the next, but the motives are the usual mix: hope, ambition, greed, fear, lust, envy, hatred of order and of art, fanatic fervor, heroic devotion, and love of destruction."

- Jacques Barzun, "From Dawn to Decadence"

Some Symphonie Fantastique Recommendations - Perhaps More to Come

Avoid: 

Norrington (not sorry)

Karajan (not sorry)

Mehta

Weingartner

Ozawa/Saito Kinen (sorry)

Argento (sorry)

Rakhlin (sorry)

Blomstedt/Leipzig (sorry)

Scherchen (sorry)

Horenstein (sorry)

Barbirolli (double sorry)

Beecham stereo (double sorry)

Davis/Londons (triple sorry)

Not Bad but not good enough: 

P. Jarvi

Beinum first recording

A. Jansons

Plasson

Dutoit (not sorry)

Gardiner (kinda sorry)

Fruhbeck de Burgos (sorry)

Dervaux (sorry)

Golschmann (sorry)

Skrowaczewski (sorry)

Gielen (sorry)

Zinman (sorry - I was at the concerts this came from, was very young....)

early Walter/Paris (very sorry)

Mitropoulos (extremely sorry)

Martinon (extremely sorry)

Maazel/Cleveland (sorry it's rated this high)

Apollonian:  

1. Mackerras/Royal Philharmonic '94: There's the stuff Mackerras does as well as anybody and then there's the stuff Mackerras does better. This is the former category. I don't know what to say except that it does absolutely everything right. Every detail that needs to register comes through the balance, every passage that requires awe duly gets its requisite awe, every phrase that requires passion gets passion. Not a single unique sound gets by Charlie Mack, and the dynamic range is as enormous as any Berliozian could possibly wish. Mackerras would be the greatest conductor of all time if it weren't for the utter efficiency with he dispatches problems that flummox lesser musicians. Everything he does is planned in a study months in advance. One comes away feeling that this delivers everything one could possibly ask from a Fantastique, and while it would be too much to demand something past our own ears' imaginings, so many performances deliver just that, and that is the only thing beyond Mackerras. 

2. (tie) Abbado/Chicago '89:  Even amid the Solti-era Chicago Symphony, there is no other recording which endows Berlioz with this grace and warmth. Abbado gives Berlioz a Bach-like spiritual glow. You could be forgiven for thinking this is a piece for the angels rather than the demons. 

3. Davis/Concertgebouw '74: Alright... time to make my peace with Davis's Fantastiques, at least these are not the London performances.... but it truly astounds me that so many people think of this recording as the ultimate Fantastique. It is so unbelievably relaxed and low key. Nevertheless, if I'm being honest with myself, it's a very good reading by a master Berliozian that understands most of what this music needs. Ultimately, I just think this wasn't his work. Ever the Englishman, I've always had the sense that Davis was most at home in choral repertoire, and Davis was practically put on earth to show us how to do Berlioz's vocal works (all of them...). To me, this recording is an end rather than a beginning. It 'tamed' the Fantastique and made people feel as though they finally understood it - showing people heretofore unheard things like the repeats and the optional cornet, and in doing so, made them feel ready to discover other Berlioz masterworks, perhaps greater ones. 

4. (tie) Zecchi/Czech Philharmonic '60: Even if he was better known as a pianist and teacher, Carlo Zecchi was a very real musician with ties as deep in Mitteleuropa as in Italy. Zecchi was a big influence over Abbado and particularly Mehta, and it shows in the steady pulse and gorgeously lush sound he conjures from the famously un-lush Czech Philharmonic. The warmth and irony of the third movement makes it sound like the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony. He rescores a number of moments - adding brass for clarity, adding horns and trombones to the Dies Irae. Perhaps the re-scorings worked better live, but they frankly don't work on recording. Nevertheless, is the work of a very real musician.  

4. (tie) Franck/Radio France 2018: Twenty years ago, Mikko Franck was supposed to be the superstar Klaus Makela is now. Unfortunately, back problems kept him out of the concert hall for a while, and by the time he came back everybody basically forgot about him. What amazes about Franck is that in his mid 40s he has the restraint of a septuagenarian's experience. After a rather too sedate opening movement, what emerges is a luminous, almost Brahmsian performance that's a little too unspectacular, full of lyricism, warm phrasing, and inner voices emerging out of the balances, with a slow but beguiling waltz; and then unfolds the most gorgeous, perceptive slow movement since Pierre Monteux. One could ask for more - he deliberately minimizes cymbal crashes in the scaffold march so as not to obscure the musical line, but it all pays off in a last movement of such awesome Berliozian force, all the more effective for being unexpected. The conception here is so thoughtful that it could be Leon Fleisher or Sandor Vegh on the podium. If his health keeps up, perhaps even if it doesn't, this man is going to be a master very soon. 

6. Boulez/Cleveland '95: It's not a modernist reading, just a classical one - limpid and lithe, much more Haydn than Mahler. Every expression is restrained, but the content comes through with stunning clarity and fidelity to the score. It's Fantastique completely defanged - ultimately quite enjoyable, but surely the Fantastique means more than this.

Dionysian: 

1. Munch live Paris '67 inaugural ODP concert: It is not Berlioz's SF. It's decadent, elephantine, with artificial effects imposed everywhere, but it is the most absorbing, passionate, loving performance there has ever been. It is perhaps the last celebration of the old French orchestral tradition, and amid the tatters of its then state comes an inspirational celebration of everything their musicians inspired. From first bar to last, it is an absolute bacchanale, turning the ears upside down like a natural event. 

2. Cluytens live Tokyo with OSCC '64 - Pretty much the same thing....

3. Bernstein/ONF video '76 - Bernstein is not out to create the bacchic frenzy of Munch and live Cluytens. The sheer excitement rivals the above two, but it is also more disciplined and directed. Lenny is out for something much more subjective and literary - to dramatize Berlioz's ideas in sound. On that score, no one conjures Berlioz's programmatic episodes with this level of vividness, even if you don't feel much beyond the effects themselves. One can argue, not without cause, that it's done for effect, but what effects! This is an agon between two flamboyant geniuses. It neither gets us quite the excitement unlimited of Munch, nor does it delve particularly into the entire world of Berlioz after the manner of Markevitch, but it achieves its effects on a level that will leave your jaw at your feet.

4. Dudamel/Bolivar/Radio France 2010 (really) When Dudamel is on he is ON, and however inconsistent and instinctual his talent, the potential for cosmic artistry is ever present. It has its flaws - you can practically hear two different orchestras here - the French sticking to their elegance while the Venezuelans put their whole bodies and souls into it. In strings, the huge vibrato of one consistently clashes with scant vibrato of the other, but it would only bother you if you're a pedant. I defy anyone to listen to this and not be riveted. There must be well over 200 musicians onstage, and while the sound has all the mass that implies, it has the most incredible tenderness too. The noise they make is absolutely arresting, all the moreso for Dudamel's manic, exhorting, romantic interpretation that alternates the most unbelievably dynamic whirlwinds with softness that aches with vulnerability. Listen to the tenderness of those strings in the waltz.  Dudamel even comes closer to sustaining an inadvisable 18 minute slow movement than anyone should. Yes, there are miscues and bad decisions, but this is no mere slick flash in the pan. 

5. Bernstein/New York '63 In these 'episodes in the life of an artist,' the emphasis here is on the 'episodes.' Bernstein is completely uncontained by form and completely releases the bridles of Berlioz's imagination with manic slow and fast tempi within less than sixty seconds of each other. Bernstein expresses in primary emotions, and whatever the most obvious emotion is at any given moment, Bernstein maximizes it. It's all very melodramatic, but the excitement is so undeniable. This Berlioz throbs. The problem, of course, is the third movement, which Bernstein's manic depressive approach cannot make into a coherent narrative, and if you try to maximize the stillness and boredom of the country, you end up creating five minute dead spots.  

6. Koussevitzky/Boston '43 It's very good, but it will not give a sense of why Koussevitzky's Boston is great as or greater than any orchestra will ever be. Even in the shrill compressed sound, you hear that the BSO plays it magnificently, but Koussevitzky's romanticisms are simply too much. He certainly takes us deep into the imbalanced heart of this work, but for a musician so at home among the French, this is so un-classical,  so melodramatic, so grandiloquent, that you can't really believe the story it tells. Nevertheless, as far as a 'dionysian' vision goes, nobody, not even Munch, takes us this far into the fantome of Berlioz's manic insanity. 

Hermean: Virtuosic feats

1. (tie) Markevitch/Berlin '53 - Virtuoso in the very best sense. It is, almost beyond doubt, the most sensitively played. Every moment bespeaks an ensemble that knows how to express the true nature of every bar. And yet, is it too suave and smooth? Surely Berlioz meant something more untamed than this. Markevitch would do better later. 

1. (tie) Otterloo/Berlin '51: Fiery virtuosity, but perfectly contained within the form. It deserves great notice and to be ranked higher. Not unlike the immortal [to my ears] Cluytens/Philharmonia in outline, but more streamlined. Less warmth, more fire. One is reminded of George Szell from first bar to last. Otterloo would do better later. 

3. Mravinsky/Leningrad '60: A performance like no other, more an experience than a performance. Ever Mravinsky's way, it's refined to the point of aristocracy, and yet overbearing and brutally terrifying. I don't know whether to put this in virtuoso or modern, because I don't know if there's any interpretive logic at all. It is simply, a terrifying, gripping Soviet performance, yet with one of the airiest and most absorbing third movements ever captured by tape. It is, as ever with Mravinsky, fire and ice. Warmth is found nowhere, and yet its passionate intensity insists on every bar. 

4. (tie) Munch/Boston '54: The other 'Greatest Fantastique Ever' does not have the abandon Munch would later deliver. It's a truly excellent virtuoso reading, but when you compare to Munch himself later, it's a slick professional job. It lots of fun, but it doesn't really mean anything. 

4. (tie) Paray/Detroit '59: A reading both great and overrated. It's overly driven, almost brutalized, but it is astounding how well the Michiganders keep up. The precision is worthy of Reiner and then some, and one cannot doubt the authentic phrasing or the timbre. Yet even so, there is something unpleasantly aggressive and driven. Surely Berlioz is more than a Formula One engine. 

6. Muti/Philadelphia '85: Where else will you put Muti/Philly? At no point is this Berlioz rather than Muti playing Berlioz. There isn't much deep thought here, but there also aren't the pratfalls of thought - like trying to make too much of the 'nature movement.' In place of thought, there is so much intensity, so much craft, and so much style. They turn corners as smoothly as a Ferarri. Munch and Cluytens (live) drive it much harder, but their fabric is nowhere near so tensile, and their deliberate messiness is how their exaggerations still manage to sound human. Even in the most extreme corners, Muti sustains faultless precision amid immaculate vocal lines and unanimity of style. Some people love musicians who play more like gods than men, I am not one of them. Like so much early Muti, this performance is a vapid miracle. 

Vulcanian: Modernist and Innovative

1. Markevitch/Lamoureux '61 - A completely sui generis performance, in a very different spirit from his Berlin recording. It's almost like an interview of the piece, an commentary on it, that highlights every modern dissonance and timbre and asymmetrical phrase. So vivid that it almost conjures a complete literary experience. Munch provides the height of heart, but this provides the height of expression. It feels so specific that you feel the obsessional longing, the aristocratic refinement and sensuality, the wind and sunlight and rain, the dread of the guillotine, and the horror of the flames. This is the world not just of Berlioz but of his whole era - Balzac and Dumas in music. Along with the one far below... it may in fact be the essential Fantastique.

2. Haitink/Concertgebouw, Christmas Matinee '79 - There has never been a performance to follow the score's dynamics this literally. It both wipes the slate clean from romantic excess and also releases an electric charge that only an orchestra as great as the Concertgebouw can when they are at the height of their powers. When you compare this to the Disneyfied performances going on in Berlin of Karajan, you marvel that musicianship this real was going on at the highest echelons of the 70s and that there were star younger conductors of that era not painting in Karajan's neon. It is not virtuosic, because there is nothing is done for effect here except to demonstrate the veracity of the score. It is not an Apollonian performance because the Symphonie Fantastique is not an Apollonian score. Nor is it the 'pure musicianship' of Monteux or Jansons, who demonstrate the loving spontaneity that is the only way to enliven the slow movement. It is, quite simply, a very modern examination of precisely what this score is, and thereby a towering performance.

3. Klemperer/Philharmonia '66: Whenever I'm given a choice I take Klemperer live. The sound on the copy I have is terribly synthetic, with that odd electronic reverb that sounds like a guitar distortion. And yet the bass-heavy intensity of the Klemperer sound comes completely through. The dogged concentration goes all the way through the performance, and as always, Klemperer makes the stakes existential - deadly serious on the surface, black humor just beneath. This is Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique for a generation who'd heard Mahler and Mussolini. Ever an underrated colorist, the new colors are everywhere to be found, even as Klemperer keeps the tempi absolutely steady.  When it comes to conjuring grotesquerie, Klemperer had nearly no equal in orchestral history. A performance, of course, like no other - more Camus than Dumas. 

4. Barenboim/WEDO Proms '09 When Barenboim decides to kick off his shoes and have fun, this is the result. Like Otterloo with the Hague Philharmonic, he's not facing the Berlin Philharmonic, and that's all to the good. He's free to make any requests he wants, and every moment has a new color, a new phrasing, a new way of looking at the music. The result is, of course,  too Wagnerian. This is Danny B. after all, and everything is seen through the Tristan lens. Every chance to inject yearning chromaticism is there, every chance to suggest vague disembodied possibilities, every chance to balance the french horn in front of every wind choir,... but the 'elan' and 'eclat' of the offsetting tonic, 'fun' moments is unmistakable. If only Barenboim always played like this he'd deserve every last bit of his awesome reputation.

5. Silvestri/OSCC '61 - Rather spoiled by an 18:15 third movement that makes flies drop to the floor, but the whole thing is a completely unique and insightful conception. The playing is not great, but Silvestri is sui generis. Good or bad, you get things from him you get from no one else, and there is no world in which we'd be better off without his insights. As for the insights themselves? Well... you just have to hear them. What he does is far too specific to get into in a single paragraph.

Orphic: Pure Music

1. (but...) Cluytens/Philharmonia '58 - It's the closest we get to an ideal conception, it reveals the inner meaning of so much. I don't have the secret of a conductor like Cluytens, but it seems as though he just conjures the proper sound, phrasing, balance and character from the ether. Even with a British orchestra, it's pure French folk music. 

2. Jansons/Berlin Istanbul 2001 - Caught live amid the echo of a Byzantine cathedral, yet every note matters. You don't just hear every detail, you hear every detail in the context of phrasing and balance, and yet there is such weight of tone that the Berlin Philharmonic sounds twice its size. In Jansons there's no division between classical and romantic, form and content, passion and precision, it's just music. 

3. (tie) Walter/New York live '54 - Perfect musicality. I wish, oh how I wish, Walter played more music from outside the Austro-German tradition. He knows exactly where to put the rise and fall of every phrase, he knows exactly where in the harmonic structure to put every rubato and just how much to advance the music's momentum. Walter's earlier, more famous, Fantastique from Paris is much less idiomatic than this. In Paris, he is heavy and gemutlich in a work whose spirit is the exact opposite of heavy gemutlichkeit, but here, whether it's because he'd consulted Monteux or Munch or Morel, or because he simply felt the score more freely, his playing is filled with the cosmic musicianship which never deserted him in music of the main Austro-German line. 

3. (tie) Otterloo/Hague '59 - By any standard but Berlin, the amount of virtuosity on display here is astonishing. Listen to 'the E-Flat Clarinet from Hell' in the last movement, try not to gasp at the force with which they attack the March to the Scaffold. But you also get a sincerity of expression you almost never get from Berlin. Just listen to that cantabile all through the first two movements - it's Kreislerian, Kubelikian, Pattian... these are simple human beings making music that's about love, obsession, mental illness, horror, fun, and drugs....

5. Monteux/San Francisco '50 - Monteux's 1930 performance (below) is unrepeatable. A French orchestra tradition still thrived, depleted only by one war rather than two. Next to the effortless French agility of Monteux's Orchestre Symphonique, the San Francisco Symphony cannot help but sound a little shrill and frenetic. It's basically the same interpretation, but the sound is much more vivid. Like Kubelik, Monteux is an ideal: passion without grandiloquence, risks but managed, not the dionysian playing of a rock star nor the Apollonian perfection of an untroubled soul nor the virtuosic precision of a military commander; rather the small-scale personalized expression of a musician playing for and with his friends. Perhaps the last two movements suffer a bit from this deliberate lack of spectacle, but only a master can make the third movement sound equal to the rest, and surely this is its most absorbing performance.

6. (tie) Kubelik/Bavarian Radio '81 - The list of my ideal performing interpreters are always changing, but the abiding love for Kubelik remains ever the same. Kubelik always seems unplanned, and yet the tempi flow with rubato just enough that it is absolutely never boring. He's broader than twenty-two years earlier, yet he knows music so from the inside that every deviation from the score feels entirely organic. It's not French sounding in either conductor or orchestra, but the inner light music's healing power is ever present.

6. (tie) Pretre/Boston '69 - A kinder, gentler, 'more musical' performance from the Munch template. What Munch drives, Pretre does naturally. Like the great man just below this entry, Pretre leaves it to the orchestra. He simply shows them what he wants and lets a great orchestra do what they do. The expression always comes from the player's heart rather than the tip of his baton (though Pretre's baton showed every single nuance). The orchestral sound is always 'spread out,' with attacks habitually never on the beat. The phrases expand and contract like human breath. There's no false precision or virtuosity, the music simply sings, dances, explodes, implodes, paints and talks.

8.  Beinum/Concertgebouw '51 - his remake. I initially put this in 'Apollo' but Beinum deserves to take his place among the pure musicians. I don't know if it's more than perfect, but it is perfect. I don't have the secret of Beinum perfect Apollonian pitch, but he finds the right 'tone' for every phrase, he can convince you that the SF is flawlessly constructed, and makes Berlioz truly worthy of Mozart. In spite of his oft-steady tempi, perhaps the appelation 'Apollonian' does not do this justice, as it does not so much Beinum, and it belongs in a different category far below... 

9. (tie) Bychkov/NYOGB 2010: An orchestra of 160-180 young musicians giving most eruptive, fiery orchestral sound ever conjured in this most eruptive orchestral work, all contained within measured, sensible interpretive framework. The dichotomy is unlike anything you will hear, and perhaps closer to Berlioz's own vision than any other recording. 

9. (tie) Kubelik/Concertgebouw '59 - I simply don't know how he does it, but the best way I can describe it is that Kubelik is like a meal from your grandmother. He clearly doesn't bother himself with the fancy technical matters, he simply knows exactly when to put in a dash of rubato, a pinch of crsescendo, and set the exact right temperature at every moment for a chemical change to happen that defies rational explanation. It tastes or feels exactly right. 

11. Rozhdestvensky/Leningrad London '72 - This is the inevitable grouping where the true masters go. However intrusive the brass and timpani blare, the thousands of nuances in the strings amid that phrasing is unlike anything you've ever heard. Every detail adds to the whole, and amid the strings and winds, the tens of thousands of nuances here are unlike anything you've ever heard - all of them seeming to add up to an indivisible whole. There's only so much 'Naddi can do to stop the terrifying interruptions of the Soviet brass and percussion, but he sounds as though he does everything he can to work their context into his conception. 

12. Ansermet/Suisse Romande '68 - It's from the year Ansermet died, and what a way to go out. Short of the Dionysians, this is the most exciting Fantastique you could imagine, but obviously with far greater taste and elegance than Munch would ever bridle himself to. The Suisse Romande is as imprecise as ever, but it's neither known for its excitement nor its weight of tone, and yet just listen here...  In extreme old age, Ansermet is not just a musician of perception and panache, but one whose excitement equals any in the world. The only problem in this performance is the nature movement, the one movement in which you'd expect an octogenarian to succeed beyond everyone else. For four out of five movements, this is as great a Fantastique as has ever been set down. 

12. Beecham/Orchestre National de France 1958 - Beecham would remake this mono recording one year later in stereo. It's a very famous recording, and yet whatever he had the year before, he lost.  In this mono version, the slow movement is dispatched in a mere 13 1/2 minutes, yet it's shaped with the freedom of Mahler. A year later he'd slowed it  to 17 minutes with nary a rubato. Nevertheless, for three movements, this one is as great a Fantastique as exists, leavened with warmth and fire in every bar. The problem with the final two is the orchestra, who simply can't play all the effects well enough to shock us, nor does Beecham have insights worthwhile enough to make subpar execution worthwhile. Beecham is never one to slather rubato all over a piece of music in the name of individuality. One friend referred to Beecham's goal as 'artless artfulness, careful carelessness,' and that demands more involvement than the sometimes metronomic stateliness of his sometimes overvalued final recordings. At his worst, Beecham was as wooden as an ivory statue, but at the best he arrived at quite often, Beecham is as true a maestro as the world has known. 

13. Chung/Radio France 2013 - Even more inconsistent than Beecham. It may be the single greatest opening movement ever caught on record, sensitive to everything, utterly spontaneous without ever drawing attention to its improvisation. It's just a miracle. The third movement, the masterpiece of conductor assassination, is on the same level - and yet at a very slow tempo, as is the beginning of the finale, full of original rubatos and sounds. The waltz has wonderful lyricism even if the playing sounds a little unrehearsed... it's really just the final two movements that do not deliver on what it promises. A march that is too fast and over in a flash without any real thought and indifferently played. And then there's the latter half of the finale, which is just so.... routine. Over and over again, the best way I can describe Chung is he's the greatest conductor in the world for twenty minutes at a time. 

The Olympian Summit;  

Monteux/OSDP '30 - In the centenary year of the Symphonie Fantastique comes the closest we'll ever get to hearing this music as the composer himself did. Monteux was Eduard Colonne's assistant, who was Berlioz's, and Monteux worked from the score of le maitre himself (l'autre maitre...). To this day, there can be no greater Fantastique than this. There are other early recordings, but this breathes a different air whose circumstances we can't understand, nor can we approximate what it sounded like live. It just feels right in the same way that it feels right when a bluesman is from the Mississippi Delta.

The absolute essentials: 

Gold:
Pierre Monteux/Orchestre Symphonique de Paris 1930

Charles Munch/l'Orchestre de Paris 1967, live

Igor Markevitch/Lamoureux Orchestra 1961

Andre Cluytens/Philharmonia Orchestra 1958

Mariss Jansons/Berlin Philharmonic 2001, video

Silver: 

Andre Cluytens/Orchestre de la Societe Conservatoire 1964, live

Willem van Otterloo/Hague Philharmonic 1958

Leonard Bernstein/Orchestre National de France 1976, video

Bernard Haitink/Concertgebouw 1979, video

Bruno Walter/New York Philharmonic 1954, live

Georges Pretre/Boston Symphony 1969

Bronze:

Igor Markevitch/Berlin Philharmonic 1953

Sir Charles Mackerras/Royal Philharmonic 1994

Willem van Otterloo/Berlin Philharmonic 1951

Gustavo Dudamel/Simon Boliver Youth Orchestra/l'Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France 2010, live video
Rafael Kubelik/Bavarian Radio Symphony 1981, live

Eduard van Beinum/Concertgebouw 1951

Semyon Bychkov/National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain 2010, live video

Pierre Monteux/San Francisco Symphony 1950