Symphonie fantastique / Le Corsaire Overture

"Slatkin may not be a celebrated or 'authentic' Berlioz interpreter, but his polished, traditional approach isn't negligible. His reading is somewhat monumental, but not cripplingly slow...and beautifully detailed...excellent playing and recording still gives this disc a respectable place in a crowded market."
(BBC Music)

"one of its admirable qualities is the lucidity of playing that responds well to the particular palette of sonorities that Berlioz envisaged...the performance has its merits in precision and in some dramatic explosions, but as a whole tends to run a somewhat literal course rather than being imaginatively brought to life."
(Gramophone)

Immensely influential, the remarkable Symphonie fantastique was composed while Hector Berlioz was suffering an intense and unreciprocated passion for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson. Its autobiographical tale describes a young musician's opium-poisoned nightmares of jealous despair and fatal justice following the murder of his beloved. Berlioz wrote a second movement cornet solo into a subsequent revision of the score, here included as an optional extra. He wed his sweetheart actress but, recuperating in Nice, wrote Le corsaire after the final breakup of their marriage.