Fantastic

Simply the greatest live performance I have ever heard of Berlioz's 'Symphonie Fantastique' at the Kiev Philharmonia this evening. Not only that, but it was preceded by a lip-smacking version of his 'Harold in Italy', with the Israeli violist, Avri Levitan. The National Academic Symphony Orchestra under Mikola Dyadyura gave superb accounts of these masterworks, greatly assisted by the acoustics of the hall. The neo-classic Philharmonia building was originally a gentleman's club. The auditorium seats maybe four or five hundred (it was packed), and its sound is particularly clean and pure. So when you get a large orchestra giving its all, you are in the thick of it. These were lurid performances, but deliberately so - Berlioz would have loved them, I am sure - the almost over-ripe romanticism risked conjuring up some of the more bizarre canvasses of Antoine Wiertz, but at the same time Dyadyura had calculated every sound and gear-change and his players responded superbly. I liked the touch of having the harps either side of the orchestra up front (see picture), which swept us into the ballroom scene - an effect mirrored in the Witches' Sabbath when we had two sets of tubular bells up in the gallery, taking the 'Dies Irae' alternately. Cunningly, a virtue was thus even made of the limited size of the Philharmonia stage. 10+ out of 10.