Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique: Piano vis-à-vis Pleyel 1928

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New insights abound, with a truly affecting wistful fragility in the symphony’s opening pages, supplanted by impressive richness of tone once Berlioz’s tale truly sparks into life. There are,... — BBC Music Magazine, March 2019, 4 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 18th Jan 2019
Catalogue No: HMM902503
Label: Harmonia Mundi
Length: 52 minutes

Presto Editor's Choice

January 2019

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Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Work length52:19

$6.60

$8.25

$9.65

Jean-François Heisser (soloist), Marie-Josèphe Jude (soloist)

1. Rêveries - Passions (Transcribed for Piano Duet by Jean-François Heisser)

Track length14:42

$1.60

$2.00

$2.35

2. Un bal (Transcribed for Piano Duet by Jean-François Heisser)

Track length6:05

$1.00

$1.25

$1.45

3. Scène aux champs (Transcribed for Piano Duet by Jean-François Heisser)

Track length14:21

$1.60

$2.00

$2.35

4. Marche au supplice (Transcribed for Piano Duet by Jean-François Heisser)

Track length6:40

$1.00

$1.25

$1.45

5. Songe d'une nuit de sabbat (Transcribed for Piano Duet by Jean-François Heisser)

Track length10:31

$1.40

$1.75

$2.05

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A composition that marked the birth of the modern symphony orchestra, it was instead through the medium of the piano that Symphonie fantastique became generally known to the public when Franz Liszt a prime champion of the music of his friend, Hector Berlioz made a transcription of the work for solo keyboard. The project undertaken here by Jean-François Heisser and Marie-Josèphe Jude continues that respected tradition, but it doubles the stakes and multiplies the pleasure: the expanded sound palette offered by the two-keyboard piano constructed by Pleyel and housed at Paris Museum of Music gives rise to unexpected colours emanating from the shared resonator box, and their fingerings (twenty fingers strong) can reproduce the minutest details of Berliozs dazzling, ground-breaking orchestral writing. The work of a master indeed!

Reviews

March 2019

New insights abound, with a truly affecting wistful fragility in the symphony’s opening pages, supplanted by impressive richness of tone once Berlioz’s tale truly sparks into life. There are, inevitably, moments that fall short of the orchestral palette, especially in the witches’ Sabbath…yet there is still magic aplenty in this intriguing perspective on Berlioz’s vision.

January 2019

I wasn’t particularly enthralled by the prospect of hearing Berlioz’s orchestral Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man shorn of its phantasmagorical orchestration when my colleague first suggested this, but I’m so glad I stuck with it: the Scène aux Champs sounds uncannily like a Bach invention, whilst the eerie sonorities of the double Pleyel are so bone-chilling in the Scaffold and Witches’ Sabbath that I didn’t miss the snarling brass and macabre E flat clarinet at all!

Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique

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