Symphonie fantastique

During this concert, you’ll have once-in-a-lifetime experience with your Charleston Symphony, featuring the extraordinary violinist Anne Akiko Meyers and revered Austrian conductor Hans Graf. You’ll be captivated by Ravel’s Mother Goose and Barber’s Violin Concerto, as well as the epic orchestral masterpiece that is Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. From tender love scenes to a gripping march to the scaffold and an opium-fueled nightmare, Berlioz’s mesmerizing composition takes you on a thrilling, unforgettable journey.

Symphonie fantastique with Anne Akiko Meyers

Grammy Award-winner Anne Akiko Meyers will perform Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto — a piece she once played for a massive audience of 750,000 in Australia. The concerto is famous for several reasons, not the least of which being that in its final movement Barber requires the soloist to prevail with a thrilling, consuming, and breathtaking finale.

Hector Berlioz composed Symphonie fantastique while he was wracked with passion, fixated on an unrequited love, and deeply inspired by Beethoven. In doing so, he gave the world five movements of intense narrative portraying love’s torment and bliss through the opium dreams of an imaginative young man. In 1830, nothing like it had ever been heard before. Today, it endures as a captivating work of art that spans the orchestra’s instruments, with everything from a delicate waltz theme to ravenous and eerie chaos, and it is regarded as the pièce de résistance of Berlioz’s compositions. 

MORE ON THE MUSIC & ARTISTS:

• “Anne Akiko Meyers is the coolest thing to happen to the violin since Stradivari.” — Denver Post
• Meyers performs on the much-admired 1741 ‘Vieuxtemps’ Guarneri del Gesu given to her on lifetime loan. Read more in this cover article from The Strad in 2018.
• Hans Graf is the Music Director of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Emeritus of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, among other current and past appointments. He has an extensive discography and won a Grammy Award in 2018 for Best Opera Recording.
• Prior to writing Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz wrote to a friend, “For some time I have had a descriptive symphony … in my brain. When I have released it, I mean to stagger the musical world.”

PROGRAM

Maurice Ravel
Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose)

Samuel Barber
Violin Concerto, Op. 14

1.  Allegro
2. Andante
3. Presto in moto perpetuo

INTERMISSION

Hector Berlioz
Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

1. Rêveries (Passions)
2. Un bal (A Ball)
3. Scène aux champs (Scene in the Country)
4. Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold)
5. Songe d’une nuit du sabbat (Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath)

ARTISTS

Hans Graf, conductor
Anne Akiko Meyers, violin