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New release! Companion audio CD to the acclaimed Keeping Score series.
SKU: 7977A
The 24-year old Hector Berlioz, happily enrolled at the Paris Conservatory after a desultory sojourn in medical school, fell madly in love with Irish actress Harriet Smithson—or at least with his idealized image of her and her onstage roles. The real Harriet found him offputting—there’s something wrong about his eyes, she said—and kept her distance, leaving his torrent of passionate letters unanswered. Hector’s persistence won out and the two were married in 1833, despite their obvious incompatibility. But before the wedding bells came a period of anguish for the hypersensitive young composer, who in 1830 poured his yearning and frustration into the programmatic Symphonie fantastique, telling of a morbidly amorous young man’s fatal attraction to an idealized young lady. The gruesome plot leads inexorably to the Symphonie’s delectably sacriligeous finale, in which Berlioz exacted his gleeful revenge by morphing Harriet Smithson into a rowdy, cackling witch.
This companion concert recording for Keeping Score: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, as seen on PBS, was recorded live in Davies Symphony Hall in December 2007.
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