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