Temperamentally, with his bent for the romantic and the histrionic, Barenboim is admirably suited to the arch-romantic, arch-histrionic Berlioz; and if the present performances do not match those by Sir Colin Davis (which anyway are in a class of their own) their shortcomings, such as they are, are largely attributable to the forces under his command and to the recording. His reading of the Carnaval romain Overture, for example, has all the verve and ebullience inherent in the subject, and it is only a too distant and somewhat diffuse recording that robs it of its proper blazing impact. Similarly, the Requiem would have benefited from more needle-sharp sound; the cataclysmic brass climaxes of the ''Dies irae'', however, are suitably awesome (though more could have been made of the blood-curdling effect of the fourth brass band turning the huge common-chord fanfare into a last-inversion seventh), and the cohorts of timpani do their best to emulate Zeus Archikeraunos; but the chorus has some raw voices and its intonation is frequently suspect; and though Domingo is mellifluous in the Sanctus, his approach is stylistically out of keeping. He is better suited to the invocation to Nature from the Damnation of Faust, which by its character is more operatic: here Barenboim draws much subtle coloration from the orchestra. Three verses of Berlioz's setting of the Marseillaise, performed with some variation of scoring and pace (unlike the boringly uniform six verses in Zinman's Telarc recording, 12/88) have some curiosity value, but I can't imagine many apt occasions when one would want to play it at home.'