Symphonie Fantastique: Boulez / Cleveland O

This disc received a 1998 Grammy Award for "Best Orchestral Performance" and was also nominated for the Award for "Best Classical Album."
Hector Berlioz' 'Symphonie fantastique' is one of the most popular and enduring works of the Romantic symphonic repertoire, but although it is often held up as a perfect example of musical Romanticism, it has strong Classical elements. The forms are extensions of those of the 18th-century symphony, and Berlioz stays close to the Classical principles of harmonic and formal balance. Pierre Boulez achieves with this recording what is perhaps the perfect balance between the work's Classicism and its Romanticism.
Boulez leads the Cleveland Orchestra in a performance which highlights the mostly-traditional symphonic structure without sacrificing Berlioz' stretching of that structure to suit his undeniably Romantic program. Cleveland's players follow the conductor every step of the way--they dance, they dream, they feel lonely out in the country, they march to the scaffold. This is a blazing performance, not with program triumphing over form (as some would lead it) but with the two conjoined to form a single unit.
The much less familiar 'Tristia' completes the disc. The three movements were unrelated in their original forms, but Berlioz brought them together in 1848. They are sung here to great effect by the Cleveland Orchestra's chorus.