The soundtracks to some films never leave our memory. Heroic, romantic, creepy or absurd, sounds and visual images stay linked forever.

HYANNIS - The soundtracks to some films never leave our memory. Heroic, romantic, creepy or absurd, sounds and visual images stay linked forever.

Some symphonic soundtracks existed long before films were even imagined. Take Hector Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," which the Cape Symphony Orchestra performed, along with some contemporary soundtracks by American composer John Corigliano, Sunday afternoon at the Barnstable Performing Arts Center.

Berlioz's vision of unrequited love, death and its aftermath would easily fill the storyboard of any great director. For the composer, working in 1830, the programmatic idea was enough. And his depiction comes across just as intensely as it would sitting in a darkened theater.

The symphony - five movements of stark musical portraiture, describing an artist (a barely concealed autobiography) remembering his love in bucolic and romantic settings, giving in to opium because his attentions go unnoticed, imagining his death (and hers), and then actually witnessing his own hideous funeral - sounds as modern as anything written today.

Berlioz's nearly hourlong work pivots around an idée fixe - a musical obsession, representing the artist's idea of his beloved. At first a lovely, floating musical notion, by the fifth movement the obsession has morphed into a vulgar dance. Around the repetitive appearances of this musical character the story unfolds.

The orchestra's playing was led vehemently by music director Jung-Ho Pak. Many highlights lent themselves to this intensity: a beautiful onstage/offstage duet between English hornist Laura Pardee Schaefer and principal oboist Elizabeth Mitnik Doriss; the four-part fugue of the last movement, with unseemly bells and blasts from the horns; the ghastly con legno string playing, also in the finale, beautifully executed.

The program opened with selections from two film scores from Corigliano. The first, from Ken Russell's "Altered States," depicts three separate "hallucinations" from that psychedelic 1980s movie.

The film was strange, this music stranger. But riveting. Invoking the hymn "Rock of Ages" - in tune and out of tune - Corigliano's "Three Hallucinations" mixes saloon-style piano, amplified organ and "play what you want" instructions to the orchestra to create the head-exploding effect. Depicting goat sacrifices, acid trips and pagan rituals, any and all musical excesses are welcome.

His "Chaconne" from the more sedate film "The Red Violin" builds a strikingly different mood. Performed by soloist Elizabeth Pitcairn - the owner of the actual red Stradivarius that purportedly inspired the movie - the "Chaconne" also takes a repetitive theme, known as "Anna's Theme" in the film, and makes it the central motif.

Bassoons and trombone play an opening figure before Pitcairn launches in "Anna's" calm and inviting melody. The easy flow did not last: Double stops and a earnest cadenza, with its dramatic outro timpani duet, created challenges for the soloist. The playing was attentive and precise, a tribute to Pitcairn's familiarity with the work.

The Cape Symphony Orchestra next performs "Swinging Into the 60s," a Cape Pops presentation with the vocal quintet Five by Design, Feb. 18 and 19 at the Barnstable High School Performing Arts Center. Tickets and information: www.capesymphony.org or 508-362-1111.