Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the San Francisco Symphony for this performance of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, which was originally broadcast by the American television channel PBS in 2009 as part of the 'Keeping Score' classical music series.

Music examples and charts illustrate the analyses, and each essay is fully annotated by the editor. In some cases, the results of the original research by the editor or by others working in the field are published here for the first time. Much of the material has never before appeared in English.

A score embodying the best available musical text.

Historical background what is known of the circumstances surrounding the origin of the work, including (where relevant) original source material.

A detailed analysis of the music, by the editor of the volume or another well-known scholar.

Other significant analytic essays and critical comments, exposing the student to a variety of opinions about music."

In this masterpiece of "program" music (a genre invented by the composer), an obsessed musician is overcome by increasingly bizarre visions of his lover. This miniature score version, an unabridged republication of the Breitkopf & Härtel edition, is handy, inexpensive, and perfect for use in the classroom or concert hall.

This is the first complete translation into English of Berlioz's second collection of musical articles, originally published in 1859. The work is a uniquely Berliozian combination of light-hearted journalism and serious musical comment and analysis. Hector Berlioz's Les Grotesques de la musique is the only one of his books that has never been translated into English in its entirety. It is by far the funniest of all his works, and consists of a number of short anecdotes, witticisms, open letters, and comments on the absurdities of concert life. Alastair Bruce's fluid translation brings to life this important composer and bon vivant. He does a wonderful job of conveying all the puns, jokes, and invective of Berlioz's prose as well as the nuances of his stories. He even imitates a Tahitian accent in the translation, as Berlioz does in the original. The notes will give the reader insight into the innuendos and in-jokes that fill the pages. This translation will take its place among other translations of Berlioz's prose writings, bringing to the reader more lively examples of a still misunderstood composer caught up in the musical life of mid-nineteenth century Paris. Alastair Bruce is a London-based management consultant and former treasurer of the Berlioz Society. Hugh Macdonald is General Editor of New Berlioz Edition.

A visually spectacular interpretation of Berlioz's opera, staged by the Catalan theatre company La Fura dels Baus, in Valencia's Palau de les Arts. Valery Gergiev conducts the Orquesta de la Comunitat Valenciana, with performances by Daniela Barcellona, Lance Ryan, Elisabete Matos and Giorgio Giuseppini.

During the performances of fashionable operas in an unidentified but "civilized" town in northern Europe, the musicians (with the exception of the conscientious bass drummer) tell tales, read stories, and exchange gossip to relieve the tedium of the bad music they are paid to perform. In this delightful and now classic narrative written by the brilliant composer and critic Hector Berlioz, we are privy to twenty-five highly entertaining evenings with a fascinating group of distracted performers. As we near the two-hundredth anniversary of Berlioz's birth, Jacques Barzun's pitch-perfect translation of Evenings with the Orchestra --with a new foreword by Berlioz scholar Peter Bloom--testifies to the enduring pleasure found in this most witty and amusing book. "[F]ull of knowledge, penetration, good sense, individual wit, stock humor, justifiable exasperation, understanding exaggeration, emotion and rhetoric of every kind." --Randall Jarrell, New York Times Book Review "To succeed in [writing these tales], as Berlioz most brilliantly does, requires a combination of qualities which is very rare, the many-faceted curiosity of the dramatist with the aggressively personal vision of the lyric poet."--W. H. Auden, The Griffin

Hector Berlioz has written some of the most electrifying music of all time for brass players. Whose hair hasn't stood on end after the last chord of Roman Carnival? The "Hungarian March" from the Damnation of Faust has all the components of a rip-roaring good time for audience and performer alike, complete with that effective (loud) ending. Distilled to it's essence (without those superfluous string and woodwind parts) this piece is scored for double brass quintet with bass drum.

Simon Rattle conducts violinist Leonidas Kavakos and the Berliner Philharmoniker in their annual Europa Konzert, recorded live at the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest.

Complete, authoritative scores of two Romantic symphonic masterpieces show extra-musical themes of "program music"-and intuitive genius, Shakespearean passion of Berlioz. Includes Symphonie Fantastique "program." Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig, 1900-1910 edition.