Sir Colin Davis’s second recording of the Symphonie fantastique (an earlier one with the LSO dates from 1963) has remained most reviewers’ first recommendation for a remarkable 27 years. It has acquired excellent rivals in that time, by among others Myung-Whun Chung (DG, 4/96 – nla), and Davis himself with the Vienna Philharmonic, and most recently his new super-budget-price live LSO recording, much admired by Edward Greenfield (5/01). There have been reissues of distinguished ‘historic’ readings, including those of Sir Thomas Beecham (EMI, 11/61 – nla) and Charles Munch; and there have been two absorbing performances on period instruments, by Sir Roger Norrington and Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Davis’s 1974 reading has withstood all these challenges, even (or perhaps ‘in particular’?) the latter.
The Symphonie fantastique was in its way as revolutionary a score as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and the precise ways in which it is so original are apparent throughout this performance. Listen, for example, to the idee fixe itself: no one had ever written a melody quite like it before, and Davis’s phrasing makes this abundantly clear. The discreet use of the cornet in the second movement makes ‘Un bal’ a sinister as well as a glittering event, that and Berlioz’s way of treating it as though it were a member of the woodwind family; both these are made unassertively obvious. So is the shock, after an apparently tranquil close to the ‘Scene aux champs’, of the return of the solo oboe, answered now by ominous timpani chords – and Davis makes sure that they are audible as chords, just as he makes one realise how many nervous or spine-chilling quietnesses there are in both the concluding movements.
The remastered sound is excellent: I can detect nothing that gives away its age. My only criticism is that the original producer and recording engineers are not credited; they deserve to be