“Symphonie fantastique always strikes me with its hyper-theatrical rawness and recklessness”
The night’s BBC Proms (22 July 2025) opened with Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration (1889), one of his most recognised and frequently performed tone poems. Unlike other orchestral genres, the tone poems, developed by Liszt and later perfected by Strauss, are deeply entangled with the Romantic period and emphasises philosophical reflection through orchestral storytelling.
Compared to Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896), which is heavily influenced by Nietzsche and Wagner, Death and Transfiguration bears a more distinct Romantic trace. Frankly, this is what bores me as its emotional trajectory feels too predictable, and frustrates me as a form of romanticised emotional excess. While I fully acknowledge Strauss’s artistry, I found the strings overly lush and saturated, the woodwinds (especially the clarinet) too sweet and self-indulgent, and the brass a little too cocky.
It was the conductor Anja Bihlmaier, together with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra that washed off my partial view. As the first female appointed as the Principal Guest Conductor of BBC in September 2024, she awed me with her style of subtlety, self-restraint and precision, reducing all the redundant, excessive sentimentality and letting the virtuosity of the Orchestra shine.
Before we sliding into Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, there’s a world premiere commissioned by BBC: Mark Simpson’s ZEBRA, with Sean Shibe as the guitarist. This 20-minute electric guitar concerto, subtitled 2-3-74: The Divine Invasion of Philip K. Dick, takes inspiration from the sci-fi author’s hallucinatory encounter with a mysterious entity he called “Zebra.” The scores feel psychedelic, at times reminding me of Pink Floyd, or Dream Theater. Sean Shibe, a trailblazer for electric guitar in classical contexts, presents this electro-orchestral piece together with a set of jazz drum and keyboard in a post-tonal, expressionistic manner, supported by the BBC Orchestra.
Having listened to numerous renditions of Symphonie fantastique, I was again struck by Bihlmaier’s precision and expressive subtlety. Often marked as one of the foundational masterpieces of Romanticism, Symphonie fantastique always overwhelms me with its hyper-theatrical rawness and recklessness, where each note feels unsettled, ambiguous, yet vigorous. While Bihlmaier’s interpretation added a refined elegance, I felt the brass section in the final movement, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath”, sounded slightly husky and recessed. The church bell is positioned high on the balcony of the Royal Albert Hall which fully exploited the venue’s unparalleled acoustic resonance. However, maybe due to the physical distance between Bihlmaier and the bell ringer, the third beat of the bell consistently felt misaligned with the orchestra.