Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch, conductor
RCA Victor LSC-2608 (LP). TT: 48:40
It is easy to forget that the hi-fi movements—the “March to the Scaffold” and the “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath”—comprise barely a third of the music in the Symphonie fantastique, yet when we listen to most of the available versions of this, we can understand why the first three movements are usually passed up by the record listener. Two are slow and brooding, one is a wispy sort of waltz, and all three require a certain combination of flowing gentleness and grotesquerie that few orchestras and fewer conductors can carry off. It is in these first three movements where most readings of Berlioz’ best-known work fall flat. Either they are too sweetly pastoral or too episodic and choppy, or they degenerate into unreliered dullness.
Here, these three movements are less tortured-sounding than the intent of the music would seem to require, but they flow with a subdued langor that does seem to make a certain degree of sense and is probably a valid interpretation.
Fine, but what about the last two movements, the window-rattlers that many hi-fi enthusiasts will buy the record solely for anyway? The performances of these noisy tours de force can best be described as inspired or, rather, maniacally possessed. This is some of the most thrilling playing I have heard, under Mr. Munch or anybody else for that matter. The closing section is a real hair-raiser, that makes you want to stand up and shout Bravo, not only for Mr. Munch, but for everyone else who had a hand in this production, for it is quite possibly the finest stereo disc of an orchestra that has been made in the US. Thanks to an almost complete absence of technical gimmickry, strings for once sound like strings, brasses are round and biting, and the whole sound has the kind of richness and solidity I haven’t heard from a disc since London abandoned the RIAA curve in 1959.
The low end is deep and tightly controlled, and the highs are sweet and extended, with that rare combination of silky sheen and guttiness that can only be reproduced through real top-end response. If there is appreciable dynamic-range limiting on this, I was not aware of it, so overwhelming was the whole effect. Surfaces were so quiet and groove tracing so clean that it was easy for me to forget that I was listening to a disc.
This is one the record industry in general might do well to look to as a new standard of excellence by which future orchestral stereo discs can be judged.—J. Gordon Holt
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