Concertgebouw Orchestra & Klaus Mäkelä: Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique

Klaus Mäkelä conducts Berlioz

With chief conductor designate Klaus Mäkelä, the Concertgebouw Orchestra is performing two early Romantic symphonies which give pride of place to the heat of love. Passions ran high in Hector Berlioz’s life. Indeed, he turned his obsessive infatuation for an actress into a musical vision, the artist descending into a series of increasingly strange dreams, culminating in a maniacal nightmare. The work would become a huge success, and has remained so for 200 years. The Symphonie Fantastique is not only groundbreaking, but also irresistible.

Schumann's ‘Spring’ Symphony

Ten years later, Robert Schumann and the young Clara Wieck were finally allowed to marry following a bitter dispute with her father. Clara urged Robert to compose a symphony, and he wrote his First in just four days’ time. It is imbued with fresh marital bliss. ‘I wrote the symphony … in that springtime urge, if I may say so, which overtakes the human being probably right into old age and every year again,’ wrote the composer, the freshness of the work having rightfully earned it the nickname ‘Spring’.