Music Review - March to the Scaffold by Berlios

This fourth movement, entitled march to the scaffold, is nasty, brutish and short. Berlios adds trombones for the first time and a battery of percussion to add even more power and force to the music. In his original programm note, berlios states that this is the moment that the protagonist takes his near fatal dose of opium,. But he later revised it to say that the protagonist is actually on s for the entire pieace. Either way, the abruptness of the shifting character, intensity and vivid depictions of everything from the cheers of the crowd to the execution itself, makes it clear that we are in new territory.