I attended the Kennedy Center on January 17, 2015 at 8:00 pm to see the National Symphony Orchestra perform Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Op.14. This performance featured guest conductor Ankush Kumar Bahl and director the NSO Christoph Eschenbach.
There were two parts of the concert. First, there was a depiction of Hector Berlioz's life when he was writing his Symphonie fantastique called Behind the Score. Matthew Krause portrayed Berlioz, Melissa Lineburg played Berlioz's love Harriet Smithson, and Robert McPgerson contributed his operatic voice. It started with Krause musing on his childhood in the countryside. His father was a locally famous doctor who experimented with acupuncture. His mother was extremely religious, a Roman Catholic. However, Berlioz rejected both his parent's beliefs and ventured into music at the age of 12. Krause's narration was accented by short performances by the NSO of his other compositions throughout his life conducted by guest conductor Bahl. Berlioz later went to Paris to study medicine there at his father's persuasion, but later dropped out of the school after seeing a body being dissected. From his memoir:…show more content… "When I entered that fearful human charnel-house, littered with fragments of limbs, and saw the ghastly faces and cloven heads, the bloody cesspool in which we stood, with its reeking atmosphere, the swarms of sparrows fighting for scraps, and the rats in the corners gnawing bleeding vertebrae, such a feeling of horror possessed me that I leapt out of the window, and fled home as though Death and all his hideous crew were at my
