Berlioz 150: Symphonie fantastique

Sir Simon Rattle celebrates 150 years of Hector Berlioz – composer, conductor, critic, storyteller, determined innovator and quintessential Romantic.

Guided by a powerful imagination and inspired by some of history’s greatest storytellers, Hector Berlioz created bold, inventive music that was seething with drama. 150 years since the French composer’s death, Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO bring to life one of his most powerful musical stories, the Symphonie fantastique’s emotionally charged tale of an artist’s ‘hopeless love’.

It’s paired with music from our own era by John Adams, a composer who professes, like Berlioz, to be ‘enchanted by the orchestra’. His colossal Harmonielehre draws quotations from Schoenberg, Mahler and Sibelius into the kaleidoscopic sounds and textures of the orchestra, reaching back to Romanticism in a wholly modern way.