After 400 years, the Bard continues to provide some great shakes. Two Shakespeare-related works will be served up in the Princeton area over the course of the next week.
Tonight at 8 p.m., the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra will unveil Darryl Kubian’s “O for a Muse of Fire” (which takes its title from the Prologue to “Henry V”), as part of a concert to be held at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium. Also on the program will be Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” with pianist Serhiy Savlov, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 “Pathètique.”
Though written two hundred years after Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Bellini’s opera, “I Capuleti e i Montecchi” (“The Capulets and the Monatgues”), had a kind of parallel genesis, bypassing the Bard to draw from the same Italian Renaissance sources. Westminster Opera Theatre will perform the work next Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., at the Bart Luedeke Center, Rider University, in Lawrenceville.
Find out more in my article in today’s Trenton Times:
http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2015/03/classical_music_shakespeare_in.html
“Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow themselves, when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.”
Henry VIII, Act III, Scene 1