Hector Berlioz’s revolutionary Symphonie fantastique is one of the most difficult pieces of music to perform successfully. The conductor needs to recapture that sense of newness, of shock, terror–the hallucinatory qualities that Berlioz so carefully wrote into his score, but that today have become the commonplace clichés of everything from later Romantic music to Hollywood film scores. This performance doesn’t even begin to get the job done. We know we’re in trouble at the very first allegro, a passage that Berlioz specifically noted in the score as “difficult and requiring careful rehearsal.” Well, what Ken-Ichiro Kobayashi and his orchestra offer sounds exactly like a careful rehearsal: way under tempo, cautious, poorly phrased, and in every way exactly the opposite of the composer’s intentions. And where is the lightness and feeling for the dance in the second movement? There’s not a trace of elegance, of the melody floating like a dream on its waltz-rhythm accompaniment.
The third movement, at 17 minutes, is far too slow to sustain any feeling of tension. The wind playing is quite undistinguished, and more to the point, very backwardly balanced in the recording. This becomes a big issue in the finale, where the E-flat clarinet and piccolo in their parody of the “idée fixe” sound completely prosaic and lack any trace of the necessary, purposeful vulgarity. In the fourth movement “March to the Scaffold”, Kobayashi gets the trombone’s pedal tones right, but just about everything else wrong, from the indistinct timpani sextuplet rhythms at the opening, to the badly balanced, blaring trumpets and weak lower strings (another big problem at the beginning of the finale, which is completely lacking in atmosphere). In sum, a very unimpressive release.
