The Fantastic Symphony was written by a young composer, and here is a thrilling performance by a conductor only five or six years older than Berlioz when he gave the premiere performance in 1830, to an audience famously including Franz Liszt. Nézet-Séguin chose the work — Berlioz’s first orchestral masterpiece — for his Berlin Philharmonic debut last October, and it is clearly one of the French-Canadian’s party pieces; this superb performance with his Rotterdamsters demonstrates why. Nézet-Séguin approaches the symphony as an intrinsically dramatic work, “an instrumental drama, unaided by words”, as the composer described it. Already in the opening Rêveries et passions, Nézet-Séguin suggests the youthful, narcotic-induced fantasies of disappointed love with impulsive tempi and highly coloured instrumental detail.
The movements almost “fade” cinematically into each other as the hazy waltzing of “A Ball” comes in and out of focus. The idyllic pastoral Scène aux champs is disturbed by neuroses that eventually lead to the terrifying March to the Scaffold and the nightmarish Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath of the guillotined young man. The spectral textures give way to some of the most graphic and vividly imagined sounds — the chilling hoot of a night owl, the clatter of the skeletons emerging from their coffins, the apocalyptic Dies Irae blaring out on the low brass with menacing éclat.