Sometimes dark and bewitching, these two large-scale symphonies will create a dramatic and expressive soundtrack for your production.

This two CD set features complete recordings of two large-scale symphonic works. The first piece, Symphonie Fantastique (Fantastic Symphony), by Hector Berlioz, was composed in 1830 and represents one of the finest examples of program music (music that attempts to tell a story or create images in a listeners mind). In that sense it is one of the first soundtracks ever composed.

The story or "program" for Symphonie Fantastique is about an artist who attempts to kill himself using opium because of an unrequited love affair. The symphony is divided into 5 movements, each telling part of the story. As the artist falls further and further into an opium state of mind, the music becomes more and more hallucinatory. The fourth movemet "March to the Scaffold" is a fantasy about the artists death for killing his beloved. The fifth movment "Dreams of a Witches Sabbath" incorporates strange (for the time) orchestral effects to portray a haunted spirit world and graveyard. The great American conductor Leonard Bernstein called this symphony the first musical expedition into psychedelia because of its hallucinatory and dream-like nature. The composer Franz Liszt (the composer of the second work in this collection) made a piano reduction of Symphonie Fantastique in 1833. The two men knew each other and were friends.

The second work, the Faust Symphony, composed in 1857 by Franz Liszt, was inspired by Goethe's drama Faust. It is in three movements and the performance recorded here is over 70 minutes long. Just as each movement of Symphonie Fantastique serves to move Berlioz's implied story further along, each movement of Liszt's Faust Symphony tells a new part of the Faust drama. The final movement, Mephistopheles (Satan) is an orchestral tour de force portraying a grotesque underworld but which, finally, through the use of added male choral voices, leaves the listener in a tranquil and life affirming mood.

19th Century Masterworks Volume 6 is a 2 CD set containing complete recordings of two symphonies that define the Romantic Era in music. As underscore these works provide an incredibly expressive and dramatic soundtrack toolkit.