Klaus Mäkelä conducts Berlioz and Ravel

With its depictions of the opium-induced hallucinations of an artist despairing at his unrequited love for a young woman, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique is always a tremendous opportunity for an orchestra and conductor to showcase their abilities. Even so, it's immediately evident that this latest recording from Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä and the Orchestre de Paris is going to be an incredibly colourful performance, with a wealth of impressive moments that add up to a vivid reading of this idiosyncratic work.

The first movement is often nervy and unsettling, whether it be the mysterious timbre of muted strings, or Mäkelä making the most of every crescendo and off-beat accent to suggest that even in the initial statement of the celebrated idée fixe (the theme that reappears throughout the symphony in various guises to represent the protagonist's obsessive passion), there is already more than a hint that something is not quite right. When a brief period of respite does come along, such as the very end of this first movement (marked Religiosamente by Berlioz), it's all the more effective and calming for having been preceded by such tension.

It's a trend that continues and pervades: while there is plenty of grace and poise in the waltz of the second movement (aided by charming harps), that undercurrent of unease is never far away, with an energy that brings the movement to a dizzying conclusion. Even more so in the third movement, Scene in the Fields, where the opening duet for cor anglais and offstage oboe (with occasional accompaniment from quietly fraught violas) makes it clear this is no jolly nature ramble. Mäkelä's care over the quieter passages is remarkable - at one stage I thought things couldn't get any quieter, but then came a bar marked pppp quasi niente (almost nothing) and I was amazed that there was indeed a perceptible drop in volume.

The end of this movement reprises the cor anglais solos, but with a twist: in an extraordinary touch of orchestration, Berlioz asks for four timpanists to play a series of drum-rolls representing the ominous warning of impending thunderstorms. I reached the end of the movement feeling more than a little apprehensive (and I mean that as a compliment!).

It certainly stands us in good stead for the rest of the piece, and as memorable as the performance has been so far, it's in the final two movements where Mäkelä raises his interpretation to another level altogether. The March to the Scaffold is full of all sorts of string detail that I must admit I had hardly noticed in previous recordings, combined with fruity bassoons and trombone, plus an alarmingly strangled wail from the clarinet just before the intoxicated protagonist imagines his head being chopped off at the guillotine.

This unfortunate execution leads to visions of a witches' sabbath, and to say that Mäkelä makes this movement creepy is an understatement: the string tremolos are spine-tingling, with the woodwind also playing a crucial role, from ghoulish clarinet solos to pained glissando sighs from piccolo, flute, and oboe.

For once the bells actually sound as if they emanate from a distant, infernal graveyard, and the subsequent section where bassoons and tubas intone the Dies irae is terrifying in its inexorably savage, malevolent tread, joined by off-beat cellos and basses relentlessly stabbing away like a cohort of fiendishly demonic hags. Similarly, there's a passage later on where cellos and violas play near the bridge of their instruments, conjuring an unearthly noise as if some ghastly beast were writhing and slithering to emerge clumsily from the primordial ooze.

After such fantastical goings-on, Mäkelä concludes with a riotous account of Ravel's La valse. Placing it as a manic coda to the symphony is a brilliant idea: as a simultaneous tribute to and deconstruction of the waltz form, it's a chaotic piece in its own right, but hearing it after the Berlioz adds a layer of menace to the opening bassoon phrases, and as in the symphony Mäkelä and his Parisian orchestra offer a virtuosic tour de force from start to finish.