Seán Morgan-Rooney Prokofjev & Ravel

Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare’s play about Romeo and Juliet has been an inspiration to many other artists for hundreds of years. Also for the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, who in 1937, at the urging of dramatist Adrian Piotrovsky, wrote a 51-part ballet for large symphony orchestra about the dramatic love story. The work was a resounding success, and led the composer to rewrite the music into three different suites for orchestra and the version for solo piano that sounds at this concert.

Miroirs

“The eye sees itself not, but by reflection, by some other things…”

The suite Miroirs also has a link to Shakespeare: years after French composer Maurice Ravel completed this work, he told how the above quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar had inspired him for the title of this piece. The quote describes how we do not see ourselves directly, but perceive ourselves in the reflections of external sources. Miroirs, written in 1905, consists of five movements, each dedicated to one member of the French Impressionist artist group Les Apaches. From the agile Noctuelles (Night Butterflies) to the drama of La vallée des cloches (The Valley of the Bells): Ravel created an enchanting atmosphere in each movement in which the music imaginatively comes to life.