Star Crossed Love
April 18, 2020
This concert has been postponed. For the latet update, please click here.
Young Artist Winners
We finish the 2019-2020 season by featuring our 2019 Young Artist Winners. The BMSO will stir hearts and souls with the music of Tchaikovsky in Romeo and Juliet and his epic ballet, The Sleeping Beauty.
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Program
Romeo and Juliet...........Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Young Artist Competition Junior Division Winner, Rebecca Hart, violin
Young Artist Competition Vocal Winner, Nicholas Mortenson
INTERMISSION
Young Artist Competition Senior Division Winner, Olga Kossovich, violin
Sleeping Beauty Suite, Op. 66a...........Tchaikovsky
I. Introduction
II. Adagio
III. Pas de caracère
IV. Panorama
V. Waltz
Program Notes
Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture: Romeo and Juliet has inspired more composers than any other of Shakespeare's plays. For the 29 year old Tchaikovsky, it was his first masterpiece. Mily Balakirev was one of a group of Tchaikovsky's contemporaries known in Russia as the "Mighty Handful," or the "Mighty Five." IN May of 1869, Balakirev suggested to Tchaikovsky that Romeo and Juliet would be a wonderful subject for an orchestral composition, even offering a detailed outline of a proposed form and other elements. Tchaikovsky took his advice and consulted closely with Balakirev during the composition of the work. The Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture depicts the themes of conflict, fury, confusion, Romeo's passion and Juliet's response, Friar Laurence's pleas for peace, and the ultimate fatal pact of the young lovers. The piece put Tchaikovsky on the map as a composer. He said of the work, "It will be my most monumental work. It now seems absurd that I could not see earlier that I was predestined as it were, to set this drama to music. He completed the overture in 1869 and it was premiered March 16, 1870.
The Sleeping Beauty: Tchaikovsky was intrigued by the idea of a ballet based on Charles Perrault's La belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty) from the moment it was first proposed to him in May 1888. He began to write music that fall, as soon as he received a meticulously detailed scenario from Marius Petipa, the French-born choreographer and director of the Imperial Ballet in Saint Petersburg. Following several international concert tours that interrupted his compositional work, Tchaikovsky returned to the ballet after he got home and finished the score on May 26, and then spent the summer orchestrating the music. It was his first major work since the Fifth Symphony. The premiere of The Sleeping Beauty, in January 1890, was a great success, and it was an immediate hit with the press and the public. Tchaikovsky himself thought it one of his best works, a ―dancing symphony about fate and life woven from an old tale of a princess who pricks her finger and is put under a hundred-year spell to be awakened by a handsome prince. Tchaikovsky first considered the idea of creating a concert suite in February of 1890, but could not decide on which movements to include. As a result, the suite you will hear this evening was published posthumously.