Organization

Conductor

Alejo Pérez

Chorus master

Jan Schweiger

Singer

Contralto

Kristina Hammarström

Alto

Tenor

Denzil Delaere

Bass

Werner Van Mechelen

Opera Ballet Vlaanderen

Orchestra

Symphony Orchestra Opera Ballet Flanders

Roméo et Juliette -  (Romeo and Juliet)

Ghent

Belgium

De Bijloke

Antwerp

deSingel

Romeo and juliette: Concert Various

Public

Romeo and Juliet

Approved

'I would give anything to write a truly important work, full of passion and fantasy, worthy of dedicating to the glorious artist to whom I owe so much!' The young Hector Berlioz made no secret of his admiration for William Shakespeare. After attending a performance of Hamlet, he fell completely under the spell of the English poet, and Berlioz also harbored a lifelong fascination with Goethe. What connects the three artists across the epochs is their scorching obsession for all that is unattainable.

In 1839 Berlioz devoted a colossal work for vocal soloists, choir and orchestra to Shakespeare's most tragic couple in love with this enthusiasm. Rarely have the evocative powers of music and literature become more intimately intertwined than in Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette . And yet: precisely at those moments in the story when love burns at its most fierce, the composer prefers the suggestive expression of wordless, instrumental music.

Like the composer, Roméo et Juliette is also difficult to classify. Berlioz himself called his seven-part work (somewhat contradictively) a symphonie dramatique , and in form it hovers, like Schumann 's Faust-Szenen , somewhere between an opera, an oratorio and a symphonic poem. This idiosyncratic and hybrid character makes Roméo et Juliette a full-blooded romantic work that can be heard as a sample of musical imagination.

English

Performance credits (Cast & Crew )

Cast

Crew

Ensemble