European Tour: Symphonie fantastique

Camille Saint-Saëns’s Violin Concerto No. 3 unfolds a luminous lyricism and distinctly French elegance, balancing brilliant virtuosity with song-like poetry, ideally suited to the dazzling, expressive playing of Alena Baeva. In contrast, Lionel Bringuier conducts Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a Romantic manifesto from 1830 that transforms the orchestra into a theatre of obsessive love, pastoral reverie, military fury, and ultimately a hallucinatory, phantasmagorical finale.