Sinfonische Horizonte – Paare

Symphony concert by the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra in the Liederhalle

BERNSTEIN | Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story"
PROKOFJEW | "Romeo and Juliet" - Suite from the ballet music

Timo Brunke, concert poet
Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: Yoel Gamzou

ROMEO & JULIA

The most famous lovers in the history of literature and art, "Romeo and Juliet", became world-famous through William Shakespeare's drama (1597). The tragedy about the lovers from feuding families, which ends fatally for both, has been adapted and adapted in countless versions, including for musical theater. One of the most original of these is certainly Leonard Bernstein's musical "West Side Story", which transposes Shakespeare's plot to New York in the 1950s and brings together rival youth gangs of Americans and Puerto Ricans. Bernstein's exciting music combines elements of the operatic tradition, jazz and Latin American dance. All of this can also be heard in the "Symphonic Dances", which he himself composed for symphony orchestra.

Sergei Prokofiev wrote his ballet music based on Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" during the "Great Terror" of the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union. The piece is his first composition after his return from exile, a synthesis of Prokofiev's various main stylistic lines, which he himself once described as (neo)classical, modern, toccata-like, lyrical and scherzo. Despite the impressiveness of the music, the dancers initially found it difficult to adjust to it. Much earlier than the premiere of the ballet in 1938, music from it had therefore already been performed in concerts, for the first time in Moscow in 1936.

Even today, the sometimes powerful, sometimes wonderfully lyrical music can be admired more often on the concert stage than in the ballet. Of course, the connection between drama and setting, plot and rhythm, words and music is lost. Stuttgart concert poet Timo Brunke has therefore created an approach to the world of Shakespeare and Prokofiev with his own texts for the Philharmoniker and their audience.