Romeo & Juliet

Following up on their highly well-received season opening concert, the Kamloops Symphony’s next performance will feature their principal cellist Martin Krátký performing a ground-breaking cello concerto that is taking the world by storm, combined with the stunning masterpiece of Ravel’s Mother Goose suite and the profound tale of woe in selections from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo & Juliet. The concert, also titled Romeo & Juliet, will take place in Sagebrush Theatre on Saturday, November 4 at 7:30 pm.
The concert begins with French composer Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, which began life as a suite of “Five Children’s Pieces for Piano Four Hands.” The music was directly inspired by children’s stories from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French collections, especially Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales. Encouraged by his publisher, who saw bigger possibilities in these little pieces, Ravel orchestrated it into the suite that is being performed in this concert. The music is frequently described as exquisite and filled with musical delicacies, with Ravel showing the soul of his inner child who never left the kingdom of Fairyland.
Next on the concert program is English composer Anna Clyne’s DANCE, a concerto for cello and orchestra, composed in 2019. Dedicated to her father, the piece is inspired by a short poem by the Persian poet Rumi:
Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.
The piece is full of ethereal, lushly beautiful, and lyrical music with soaring melodies that bring about soulfully rich, gently melancholic, and deeply reflective feelings.
The KSO’s own principal cellist Martin Krátký will be performing the cello solo. A graduate of the University of Toronto and the Oberlin Conservatory, Krátký is also a core member of the Okanagan Symphony and the cellist of the Sycamore String Quartet. In addition to performing throughout the Interior, he is also a teacher at both the Kamloops Symphony Music School and the Kelowna Community Music School. In his spare time, he builds and landscapes on his 60-acre off-grid mountain property.
The concert will conclude with selections from Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo & Juliet. Telling the tragic story of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers Romeo & Juliet, the ballerina Galina Ulanova said of the work, “Never was a story of more woe than this of Prokofiev’s music for Romeo” following the premiere in January of 1940. The early history of the work was wrought with difficulty, and the composer was forced to rewrite it several times before it ultimately became one of his most beloved scores — music from the ballet has been heard in movies and television shows ranging from The Simpsons to Caligula as well as a long-running perfume commercial. Prokofiev’s music matches Shakespeare’s blend of love and violence, humour and tragedy, combining instruments like flavours in a gourmet meal, blending, enhancing, and contrasting.