TO HELL AND BACK.(festival in honor of Hector Berlioz at the Lincoln Center)

"Berlioz believed neither in God nor in Bach, neither in absolute beauty in art nor in pure virtue in life,"his friend Ferdinand Hiller recalled. The composer of the "Symphonie Fantastique"retains a fashionably satanic aura, and the reputation is well earned. The "Fantastique,"his masterpiece, anyone's masterpiece, remains a totally shocking work after all these years, and no modern music has ever really matched it. The symphony's inexhaustible novelty comes not from the discovery of new sounds--although there are many--but from the diabolical manipulation of familiar ones. The C-major coda is brilliant, triumphant, and horribly wrong, the God-given natural scale smeared ...