This superb recording further confirms, if it were necessary, that performing such music with contemporary instruments, but strings and no vibrato anywhere is far more than an exercise in scholarship. What the result may lack in weight and density is more than made up for by the gain in clarity and élan. François-Xavier Roth is particularly attentive to the latter, not stinting on the sforzandos.

The success of this account is not just through the conductor’s close study of the autograph manuscript. Roth seems to have an emotional hotline to Berlioz, alive to every twist and turn of the composer’s fevered passions.

it’s a joy to hear French musicians play music that is their birthright. It emerges in brilliant colours, but I miss the flatulent rasp of the ophicleide in the March to the Scaffold. I’ve never heard a witchier finale, though: the woodwinds cackling and the col legno strings clattering to represent skeletons rising from their graves have never been more vividly realised.

Part of the joy of this studio account of Berlioz’s extraordinary autographical fantasia, made on the back of numerous live concerts, lies in its idiosyncratic instrumental timbres, particularly audible among winds and brass…Yet there’s not only surface brilliance here; Roth clinches the album’s triumph by freshly shaping phrases and dynamics after close inspection of Berlioz’s manuscript...If this performance isn’t “fantastique”, I don’t know what is.

Berlioz: Les Francs-juges Overture, Op. 3rd Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14 Conductors Roth, François-Xavier Groups & Artists Les Siècles