Presto Editor's Choice
January 2019

Jean-François Heisser, Marie-Josèphe Jude (Pleyel piano four hands)

A composition that marked the birth of the modern symphony orchestra, it was instead through the medium of the piano that Symphonie fantastique became generally known to the public when Franz Liszt a prime champion of the music of his friend, Hector Berlioz made a transcription of the work for solo keyboard. The project undertaken here by Jean-François Heisser and Marie-Josèphe Jude continues that respected tradition, but it doubles the stakes and multiplies the pleasure: the expanded sound palette offered by the two-keyboard piano constructed by Pleyel and housed at Paris Museum of Music gives rise to unexpected colours emanating from the shared resonator box, and their fingerings (twenty fingers strong) can reproduce the minutest details of Berliozs dazzling, ground-breaking orchestral writing. The work of a master indeed!

"I wasn’t particularly enthralled by the prospect of hearing Berlioz’s orchestral Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man shorn of its phantasmagorical orchestration when my colleague first suggested this, but I’m so glad I stuck with it: the Scène aux Champs sounds uncannily like a Bach invention, whilst the eerie sonorities of the double Pleyel are so bone-chilling in the Scaffold and Witches’ Sabbath that I didn’t miss the snarling brass and macabre E flat clarinet at all!" - Presto Classical, January 2019.