Preview

If Mahler’s seventh is music for your imagination, then Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is the prequel. Kind of.

Berlioz’s calling card is found in the way he builds on what has gone before. If you’ve heard it already (don’t worry if you haven’t), then think Beethoven’s use of instrumentation in, say, the Pastoral Symphony and specifically the way he uses the orchestra to tell the story of a thunderstorm. Berlioz builds on that and ramps the orchestration process up. He creates a highly descriptive fantastical world using the expressive range of any and all instruments in the orchestra. In Symphonie fantastique that means a lot of the wood of string players bows, screeching woodwind (the E flat clarinet is a ritual humiliation to play), and thunderous percussion (to name just a few things in the score). It’s a hallucinatory headfuck on cheap recreational drugs, where Mahler — or even Wagner — offers the kind of intense emotional headrush you’d struggle to confess to a therapist. What has committed Berlioz’s symphony to the hearts of so many is the immediacy of his melodies and the accessibility of his story. It’s thunderous good fun to play and to listen to.

Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players recording from 1989 is a good place to start if you’re looking for an introduction. The gritty hard-edged clarity of period instruments gives Berlioz’s fantasy of drug-induced hallucinatory imaginings a gothic feel.

The first movement is that heady rush that characterises the anticipation of a good night ahead: intoxication. The second – simply titled ‘A Ball’ – is the music that best describes the moment when it first starts to disintegrate. An escape into the tumult of nature promises a pastoral-infused high. But the come down that follows is dark, involving wicker baskets, masked men, and guillotines. After that, the darkest horrors of all: the catastrophising of someone completely exhausted by extended partying, convinced that their imaginings are in fact inescapable.

This is not the story that Berlioz tells in his highly descriptive and ‘semi-autobiographical’ programme notes. His notes are about a man whose processing of his unrequited love is brought about by a near-overdose of opium.

Whether you’re a slave to the original text or open to the idea of its present day relevance just as we’re Shakespeare plays are given ‘a modern twist’, Berlioz’s most-loved (there can be no doubt about this) work is a must-listen and a guaranteed must-listen-again.

Be sure to listen out for the E flat clarinet part and applaud enthusiastically and appreciatively when you see the musician invited to take a bow. How they deserve it.

Gallery

📷 Mark Allan / BBC

Review

Mark Simpson is a compelling draw if you’re curious, open-minded, and — crucially — excited by what new music can make possible. His work isn’t about instant gratification or headline-grabbing novelty. Rather, it invites you into a moment where something quietly significant might be seeded — something that, years from now, someone else might fall for entirely. Premieres are moments in time when the future is cast, and the audience bears witness. Simpson has a proven instinct for honouring that contract, walking the line between virtuosic display and genuine artistic impulse — whether writing for solo clarinet, as he did so powerfully at the Lammermuir Festival in 2020, or unleashing a full-scale orchestra with electric guitar.

Mark Simpson’s new work — ZEBRA (or, 2-3-74: The Divine Invasion of Philip K. Dick) — received its world premiere at the BBC Proms tonight. A concerto for orchestra and electric guitar on an operatic scale, it’s a bold, rhythm-driven, prog-rock-infused soundscape that fizzes with colour and intent. In the first of three movements, there’s a sense that both Simpson and soloist Sean Shibe have been given free rein, permission to explore at will, and yet crucially, never at the audience’s expense. The result is fresh and relatable, but also daring: this feels like an event we’re inside, not a performance we’re politely observing. The solo line, always lyrical, expressive, and unexpectedly tender, avoids cliché and emerges as a character in its own right. The second movement shifts tone: wistful and mystical, it builds to an operatic climax before retreating into a shimmering oasis of pensive calm. The final movement picks up the pace, launching into an energising, cinematic chase sequence brimming with jeopardy. It’s full-throttle stuff: urgent, vivid, and immersive, drawing the entire orchestra (and audience) into an ecstatic conclusion.

The first movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique lacked sparkle and fizz. String textures were fuzzy, and the woodwind ensemble struggled for clarity. As a result, the opening ‘Rêveries’ fell short of fantasy or wild extremes, sounding curiously grounded — too everyday.

This lack of lift continued into the second movement, where the waltz’s lightness never quite materialised. But things shifted in the third. A handful of solo lines — notably the cor anglais and offstage oboe in their mournful exchange — brought cohesion and narrative focus. The Marche au supplice slipped briefly back into murkier territory, but the Sabbath finale brought a welcome return to form, with greater definition and drive.

A word on the presentation. In recent years I’ve largely avoided it, but this evening, listening live, I caught some of the interval feature post-Simpson’s premiere. The consistently enthusiastic advocacy of the presenter often risks sounding forced, performative or even contrived. This combined with the presence of a pundit made the exchange feel chummy, and self-congratulatory. Lots of references and demonstrations of assumed knowledge that meant something to both of them but little to me as a listener. I didn’t so much learn anything as be reminded of what I didn’t know. This is unintended, clearly. Yet the irony is that in trying to make presentation sound less distant and more ‘welcoming’ there is a sense that it’s ended up, in this case at least, alienating. Things improved a lot when Mark Simpson arrived – him being part of the focus for the entertaining concerto we’d just heard. Presenter Martin Handley seem to strike the right balance the night before discussing Walton’s Symphony No.1 with a contributor managing to combine deep knowledge with a relaxed style that made for a conversation I wanted to listen to. 

Reviews of other works in this concert will be updated in due course.

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