Berliozians are in luck this year. After Les Troyens comes an opportunity to hear the Symphonie Fantastique with its little known sequel Lélio, written in 1831.
Subtitled The Return to Life, it depicts the Fantastique's composer hero recovering from his drug-induced psychodrama, seeking solace first in memories of male friendship "untouched by passion", then in fantasies of life with a Byronic gang of brigands.
Finally he attempts to compose a work "without any hint of sadness", which proves to be a fantasia on Shakespeare's Tempest. Throughout he's deluding himself, for the "idée fixe" representing the Fantastique's whorish beloved continues to obsess him.
Audacious in form, this is a multimedia piece before its time, a dramatic monologue with music for an actor, solo piano, two tenors and a baritone, as well as chorus and orchestra. The structure is discursive, the music uneven.
The opalescent Tempest Fantasia is its high point. The gung-ho brigands, are, unusually for Berlioz, cringe-making. Not even Christopher Maltman, flexing his vocal and physical muscles as the Chieftain, could rescue them. Giles Havergal intoned a cut translation of the text.
Tenors Paul Agnew and Paul Charles Clarke had no problem with Berlioz's stratospheric vocal writing and Steven Osborne made much of the ungrateful piano part.
Charles Mackerras conducted the Royal Scottish National Orchestra with furious intensity, and the playing, particularly in the Tempest Fantasia, was gorgeous in the extreme - much finer than in the Fantastique itself, where suspect intonation intruded on Mackerras's perfectly judged interpretation.
