New Jersey Symphony: Season Finale: Symphonie fantastique

Hector Berlioz’s *Symphonie fantastique* (1830) is a five-movement “episode” in which an artist’s obsessive love unspools into hallucination, a march to the scaffold, and a grotesque witches’ sabbath, held together by a recurring idée fixe. It matters in New York because it helped define the city’s early appetite for large-scale Romantic orchestral storytelling; by the mid‑19th century it had entered local concert life through visiting European conductors and ambitious home ensembles. At NJPAC, the New Jersey Symphony places Berlioz’s program-first method and his detailed, color-driven orchestration at the center. One can hear the modern orchestra learning how to narrate without words.