"Fantastique" slights

Berlioz's Symphony "Fantastique" is another one of the longer pieces in the standard classical repetoire. It's a fairly long symphony, typically lasting nearly 58 minutes. It has 5 movements, "Reveries", "A Ball", "Scenes in the Country", "March to the Scaffold" and "Dreams of a Witches Sabbath". It's one of the early examples of program music, where the composer intends the listener to "hear" the story. Berlioz wrote his own program for it, leaving his audience the hints about his own passions. See
http://www.hberlioz.com/Scores/sfantastique.htm for more details.

Why bother to look at this? Well, it's another example of where the classical broadcasters are chopping up a masterpiece to fit their own time schedules. Sure it's long, but it's worth it and it's a grand listening experience. I just heard two performances by the Colorado Music Festival orchestra under Michael Christie. It involved a large orchestra, 100+ musicians, with 2 tympany and 2 bass drums. So what does the poor FM radio listener get to here for this work? Very little.

Here is a table showing broadcast this year. There are two columns about broadcasts, the first showing the number of complete performances and the second broadcasts of an individual movement.

Station	Full	Partial
KUSC Los Angeles	2	1
CL24 Minnesota	0	11
KCME Colorado Springs, CO	5	4
KING Seattle, WA	4	2
WBMH Birminham, AL	3	0
WGUC Cincinatti, OH	2	12
WQXR New York, NY	5	17
KVOD Denver, CO	2	1

Sad isn't it! Why can't these stations leave art alone? If a composer wants to compose 5 movements, then play 5 movements. And it if is a masterpiece like "Fantastique" let us hear it occasionally, not just a few times each year.