Passion rules! When Hector Berlioz’s stormy love affair with Irish actress, Harriett Smithson, turned sour, the result was one broken French heart and the Symphonie fantastique, the ultimate Gothic musical phantasmagoria, which has been keeping audiences on the edge of their seats for almost 200 years. Australian tenor, Steve Davislim, whose singing The Guardian hailed as “awesome”, joins podium dynamo Guillaume Tourniaire in Ernst Chausson’s exquisitely dreamy and deeply moving rumination on love and loss, Poème de l’amour et de la mer. César Franck’s tone poem depicts a man whose passion for hunting, even on the Sabbath, earned him eternal damnation.

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Maestro Series 8: Symphonie fantastique