Berlioz: Romeo Et Juliette

Sasha Cooke (mezzo), Nicholas Phan (tenor), Luca Pisaroni (bass-baritone) & San Francisco Symphony & San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Michael Tilson Thomas

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony bring unsurpassed storytelling and musicality to their latest recording on the Grammy Award-winning SFS Media label: Berlioz’s dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette. With a narrative that Berlioz deemed “too beautiful, too musical” to not be performed, this impassioned orchestral scoring of love and despair is further enriched by the vocals of Sasha Cooke, Nicholas Phan, Luca Pisaroni, and the SFS Chorus. Available in studio master-quality on two-disc SACD and for digital download and streaming.

Berlioz:
 Roméo et Juliette, Op. 17

"Tilson Thomas has long been a committed explorer of the Romantic highways. His San Francisco forces provide a typically well-prepared and fluent account of Berlioz’s score, slightly (deliberately?) on the cool side, which seems wholly in keeping with the work’s intentionally distanced take on the story. The choral singing is well-rounded, just lacking the last degree of familiarity and French fizz that European choruses can bring."
Gramophone Magazin - February 2019

"There is much to admire: buoyant energy, sparkling lightness (in the Queen Mab Scherzo), mostly well-balanced textures and acceptable if not quite native French. Yet after one hearing I felt something was missing…I pinned it down to ‘intimacy’."
BBC Music Magazine - March 2019