This recording of Symphonie Fantastique has long been highly regarded. And it remains quite competitive after over 60 years of new recordings. It certainly held a place in my vinyl library for many years, with many return trips to the turntable due to its many virtues.
What makes this such a special recording for me is Beecham's interpretation -- highly dramatic, but without going to excess. He retains that delicate balance between excitement, suspense, and Romantic scene painting (to borrow a phrase from the liner notes). He renders the hallucinatory scenes vividly. And he flows naturally and easily from one sequence to another, retaining a sense of the beauty of line and expression while contrasting sharply with derangement and terror. This all works brilliantly, and often much more successfully than other performance that seem manically driven without pause.
The sound quality is classic mid-hall EMI, beautifully captured in this excellent HDTT transfer. The underlying recording is perhaps not the last word in transparency and resolution, but the EMI engineers captured the timbre of the instruments, good dynamics and frequency extension, and some nice hall ambiance. This HDTT transfer sounds better than my memory of any of the several LP releases I had of this recording, several of which tended to the thin and strident. Not here. In this HDTT transfer, the sound is full, weighty and richly textured, while nicely capturing the piquant winds for which French orchestras have been so well known in the past.
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