Organization

Direction d'orchestre

Alejo Pérez

Direction de choeur

Jan Schweiger

Chanteur

Contralto

Kristina Hammarström

Ténor

Denzil Delaere

Basse

Werner Van Mechelen

Opera Ballet Vlaanderen

Orchestra

Symphony Orchestra Opera Ballet Flanders

Roméo et Juliette

Gand

Belgique

De Bijloke

Anvers

deSingel

Romeo and juliette: Concert Various

Public

Valide

'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

Crédits de représentation (Distribution et équipe de production )

Distribution

Équipage

Ensemble