(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Music open thread: Unnumbered symphonies [1] ['Alonso Del Arte', 'Thom Hartmann', 'Greg Dworkin'] Date: 2026-08-24 The Boston Symphony Orchestra is on the edge of going on strike. I posted an article yesterday which I will update as I come across new details. The current contract would have expired last night, but it was extended to end tomorrow night. This means that negotiations on a new contract can continue today and tomorrow. Presumably it also means that any rehearsals scheduled for today or tomorrow will still take place. I don’t know what they would be rehearsing. Any of the pieces for the September 17 season opener would be a good guess. But they might also rehearse Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, slated for the September 18 and September 19 concerts, it would follow a Mozart piano concerto with Emanuel Ax as soloist. According to the concert announcement page, the Symphonie fantastique is A work powerfully identified with the BSO’s history, [an] innovative [composition that] expanded the possibilities of orchestral virtuosity. At the same time, the work virtually defined the Romantic era in music with its passionate narrative of an artist obsessed with the object of his love. Moving from tranquil to feverish, the artist dreams of his own execution and the brilliantly depicted frenzy of a witches’ sabbath. Powerfully identified with the Boston Symphony indeed. I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole reading a discussion of which of Charles Munch’s recordings of that particular work with the Boston Symphony is best. Munch’s 1954 recording was one of the earliest stereo recordings of the piece, but apparently was originally released as monaural. The 1962 recording is pretty good, seems to be the consensus, but there is also worry that in all the repackagings, these recordings have been mislabeled. Criticizing Andris Nelsons, the current director of the Boston Symphony, music critic Lloyd Schwartz reminisced in an op-ed for WBUR about the conductors considered to replace James Levine back in 2011. Levine left because of health problems, the sexual assault allegations were still a few years from surfacing. Among potential successors to Levine, There was the excellent Stèphane Denève, who — like Charles Munch, the BSO director in the 1950s — specialized in French music, and there was Nelsons, who didn’t seem to specialize in anything I found an interesting quote from Mark Volpe, the orchestra’s former CEO, in a Guardian article from the time of Levine’s departure. Volpe is clear … that the long-term future has to be with a conductor who has the Boston job as their only major commitment. The new music director will have to be a figurehead for the musical life of the city – a role Levine could never properly fulfil, thanks to his job at the Met. (A sign of how important the orchestra is to the city: the story has made the front page of the Boston Globe in three of the past six days here.) The future is almost certainly younger. Andris Nelsons meets the orchestra for the first time in New York on 17 March, taking over another performance of Mahler’s Ninth. Volpe doesn’t want to jinx it, but he hopes Nelsons and the orchestra get on. They sure have gotten on. The musicians of the Boston Symphony are fiercely loyal to Nelsons, in a way that I doubt the striking musicians of the Detroit Symphony ever felt towards Leonard Slatkin. The Boston musicians are not happy that Nelsons’s contract, which expires next year, won’t be renewed. But Volpe, now retired, would probably not be happy that Nelsons is splitting his time between Boston and Leipzig. The concert next month, if it happens, would not be the first time Nelsons has played the Symphonie fantastique with the Boston Symphony. His 2017 performance seems to have been well received, judging by Aaron Keebaugh’s review for Boston Classical Review. Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique[, ] Berlioz’s love letter to Irish actress Harriet Smithson[,] is a show-stopper even today. The French composer’s orchestral canvas is awash with color. Flute and violin figures prick the ear, brasses blaze, and basses snarl is this portrayal of romantic excess, personal torment, and death. Works like this reveal Nelsons’ strengths. Leading with scooping gestures, the occasional slashing motion, and from-the-tiptoe downbeats, the conductor coaxed a reading of rapt energy and excitement. The symphony’s bracing power rested in the details. Nelsons shaped the idée fixe—the theme for Smithson—in cresting waves. The opening string theme floated in the air as if a whisper. The waltz of the second movement whirled gracefully. The symphony’s bucolic serenity came in the third movement, the scene of Berlioz’s opium-induced dream. Timpanists set up in Symphony Hall’s balconies sounded the distant thunder and the death knell for the fateful woman. The power came in the “March to the Scaffold.” As the young anti-hero walked to his death, the brasses sounded out the crowd theme in a scene of populist fervor. In the “Dream of a Witches Sabbath” the beloved is hideously transformed, portrayed to ghastly effect by clarinetist William R. Hudgins. Tubas punched out the “Dies Irae” with vigor, and the witches’ round dance was a frenzy. Nelsons kept the momentum going right to the end. The final chord, the ultimate goal of the figures that moved with whipcrack speed and energy, resounded in the hall. According to one commenter in the thread about Munch’s recordings of the Symphonie fantastique, the reference recording is the one by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Colin Davis. That happens to be the only recording of the piece in my iTunes collection. That I haven’t felt the need to get a different recording has more to do with that I just don’t find the piece as intensely interesting as everyone else seems to. These are the index entries for the piece in the Sixth Edition of The Technique of Orchestration by Kent Kennan and Donald Grantham: for bowed tremolo, [page] 63 for E♭ clarinet, 92, 93 oboe used in, 328 offstage trumpet in, 328 timpani used in, 228 The Symphonie fantastique is definitely something student composers and conductors need to study. But purely as a listener, I don’t really have any opinions that one performance of this particular work is better than any other. I wanted a YouTube video by the Boston Symphony showing the musicians of that orchestra playing, but failing that, I’m happy to go with the first result that comes up in the search. In this open thread, we’re not talking about opus numbers or other catalog numbers. We’re talking about symphonies which, for whatever reason, don’t have 0 or some positive integer as a sequential number among other symphonies by the same composer. It could be the case, for example, that the composer only wrote one symphony, and that would have been retroactively called “No. 1” if he had written another after that one. Or it could be the case that the composer did write more than one symphony, but neither made it into the repertoire during the composer’s lifetime. Such is the case with Georges Bizet’s two symphonies. His Symphony in C major, quickly written as an exercise for Charles Gounod, his teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, and obviously based on the older composer’s own First Symphony. It seems fitting then to include a performance by an university orchestra. Bizet wrote that in barely a month, he was only 17 years old at the time. Five years later, he started on his Roma Symphony, worked on it for more than a decade and died not feeling confident enough about it to seek a performance of the whole work. The designation of “No. 2” on this video would probably surprise the composer. Paul Dukas was also a perfectionist. I get the impression that all of Dukas’s orchestral music fits on a single CD: his ballet music for La Peri, the tone poem L’apprenti sorcier, and this Symphony in C major. Gounod did not have a high opinion of César Franck’s Symphony in D minor. Back then he wasn’t alone. It’s become very popular. The old WQRS used to play it almost every week. After WQRS went off the air, I went something like twenty years without hearing it. I guess I needed it to be submerged in my subconscious for long enough that I could one day listen to it with fresh ears. Here we hear Les Siècles conducted by François-Xavier Roth. I suppose so that this is not only French composers I should mention Anton Bruckner. Though much older than Bizet, Bruckner also wrote a student symphony, but unlike Bizet’s student symphony, Bruckner’s Studiensymphonie in F minor really has no hold on the repertoire. It is even left out of some Bruckner symphony cycles, along with the Symphony No. 0 in D minor. But in a sympathetic performance, it makes a very good impression and even hints at the power of the later symphonies. I’m not convinced that Richard Strauss’s ein Alpensinfonie really is a symphony. The open thread question: what is your favorite symphony not generally referred to with a number? [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/24/800086014/community/music-open-thread-unnumbered-symphonies/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/