In the Romantic repertoire, Michael Tilson Thomas has long been a dependable guide, demonstrating to audiences the most intricate workings and internal connections of the great masterpieces while always maintaining a coherent presentation of the music as a whole composition. His 2007 live performance of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for the television series Keeping Score: Revealing Classical Music is, audibly, a study in clarity and coherence, and even without having ...
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In the Romantic repertoire, Michael Tilson Thomas has long been a dependable guide, demonstrating to audiences the most intricate workings and internal connections of the great masterpieces while always maintaining a coherent presentation of the music as a whole composition. His 2007 live performance of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for the television series Keeping Score: Revealing Classical Music is, audibly, a study in clarity and coherence, and even without having access to the DVD of that program, one can tell that Tilson Thomas made Berlioz's madcap symphony perfectly clear to his audience and to television viewers. Yet this easy apprehension comes at a cost, which, in the case of this performance, is the emotional temperature of the music. Tilson Thomas has a remarkable and perhaps admirable objectivity about this hallucinatory and warped program piece, and there is little of the histrionics and violence that Berlioz obviously intended to be...
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