Musical pictures of obsession and intensity feature in the Springfield Symphony Orchestra's next classical concert on Saturday Oct. 20, at 7:30 p.m. in Symphony Hall.

Maestro Kevin Rhodes has chosen a very appropriate symphony for a concert taking place close to Halloween, Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. The young French composer had fallen for Irish actress Harriet Smithson after seeing her portray Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet. After receiving no answer to several love letters, he conceived of this symphony, subtitled "An Episode in the Life of an Artist, in Five Parts," as a way of channeling his obsession and expressing his feelings.

The piece, premiered in December 1830 at the Paris Conservatoire. Berlioz wrote detailed program notes, describing the lovesick, opium-addled "artist" progressing through "Reveries and passions," "A Ball," a "Scene in the Country," a "March to the Scaffold," and finally a "Witches' Sabbath." A singular melody, an idee fixe, representing the beloved, appears throughout each of the five movements, tantalizing, taunting the hapless lover over the course of slightly less than an hour.

Leonard Bernstein, referring to Berlioz's description of "an artist...who has poisoned himself with opium," is said to have remarked, "Berlioz tells it like it is. You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral."

Ever melodramatic, Berlioz also composed a sequel to the Symphonie Fantastique, entitled Lelio, or the Return to Life, for (in typical Berlioz over-the-top fashion) actor/narrator, solo voices, chorus, and "invisible" orchestra (the musicians were to perform behind a lowered curtain. The works are rarely performed together any longer, but the Springfield Symphony actually did so - with the required scrim in front of the orchestra, under the late Robert Gutter's direction.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has a long history with the music of Berlioz. So dedicated were they to realizing his dramatic vision to the nth degree that they had actual cast-iron bells pitched in G and C created especially at the request of Charles Munch for his first Boston performance of the Symphonie Fantastique in 1950. Berlioz specified "church bells" in the score, but realizing the impracticality of this stipulation, he agreed that should bells not be available, two pianos on the front of the stage should suffice.

A more contemporary incidence of romantic obsession is referenced in the "overture" for the evening, John Harbison's Remembering Gatsby: Foxtrot for Orchestra. Remembering Gatsby preceded Harbison's opera The Great Gatsby by almost 15 years, and was repurposed as the overture to that opera when it premiered in 1999. The eight-minute piece begins with an orchestral rendering of Gatsby's vision of the green light on Daisy's dock, moves into a 20s-style foxtrot led by soprano saxophone, and closes with references to car horns and telephone bells, which Harbison describes as "instruments of Gatsby's fate."

Sandwiched between these two romantic musical excursions is the towering Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Written in 1909, when the composer was 36 years old, it was premiered in November of that year by the New York Symphony Society with Walter Damrosch conducting. Gustav Mahler led the second performance in January 1910, according to Rachmaninoff, rehearsing the piece meticulously and giving an account of it that the composer "treasured."

Only weeks before the premiere of the Third Concerto, Rachmaninoff gave his first solo performance in the United States at Smith College in Northampton. According to biographer Max Harrison, the 1909 Smith concert was the first complete solo recital that Rachmaninoff ever gave, despite his world renown as a pianist. It consisted completely of his own compositions, including the Sonate in D minor, Op. 28, Melodie, Humoresque, Barcarolle, and Polichinelle - and four Preludes, including the by then well-known Prelude in C-sharp minor from his Op. 3, Five Fantasy Pieces for Piano. The new concerto was so much on Rachmaninoff's mind during his Smith visit that he inscribed three measures of it below his signature in Smith College's Distinguished Visitors Guestbook.

Soloist in the Rachmaninoff is Natasha Paremski, making her SSO debut on Saturday. Born in Moscow, Paremski moved to the United States at the age of eight and became a U.S. citizen shortly thereafter. She won the Gilmore Young Artists prize in 2006 at the age of eighteen, the Prix Montblanc the following year, and was named Classical Recording Foundation's Young Artist of the Year in 2010.

Paremski has performed with major orchestras throughout the U.S., South America, Europe, and Asia. She brings her musical mastery to the world of film as well, appearing in a BBC TV exploration of Tchaikovsky's life and work, shot on location in St. Petersburg, and in the film Twin Spirits starring Sting and Trudy Styler and dealing with the music of Robert and Clara Schumann.

Her interest in new music has resulted in works written especially for her, including New York composer Gabriel Kahane's 2008 Sonata, commissioned by Linda and Stuart Nelson for Natasha Paremski.

Her impressive repertoire offered during the current season includes Rachmaninoff's Second and Third Piano Concertos, and his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, along with Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2, and Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1.

Tickets priced from $22-$65 may be obtained through the SSO box office, (413) 733-2291, or online at www.springfieldsymphony.org