Love, Fate, and the Music of Romeo and Juliet

Valentine’s Romance: Star-Crossed Lovers brings together three Russian composers whose music confronts a familiar human question: how love persists – or fails – when shaped by conflict, fate, and loss.

For Music Director Aram Demirjian, the program offers a way to mark Valentine’s Day without reducing the music to sentiment. “It does not get more romantic than the music that we have chosen for our February Masterworks program,” says Demirjian. “It’s a great opportunity to celebrate Valentine’s Day with somebody you care about, but also to experience music that captures love in all its complexity.”

The concert is framed by two contrasting interpretations of Romeo and Juliet. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy captures the emotional core of the story rather than tracing its events. “He evokes the full range of emotions in the drama,” says Demirjian, moving from the solemn opening associated with Friar Laurence, through the violence of the feud, to the work’s central love theme. Of that theme, he adds, “It’s just so beautiful and so moving. And he knew he had something good, because it comes back three times over the course of the piece.”

Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet takes a more direct approach. Drawn from his ballet and orchestral suites, the selections heard on this program follow the story from youthful innocence to final catastrophe. “Prokofiev does a more linear telling of the story,” says Demirjian. “We’re pulling from each of the suites to create an overview that tells the full arc, from the beginning all the way to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet.”

At the program’s center is Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a work Demirjian calls one of his favorites in the piano repertoire. Though unrelated to Shakespeare’s narrative, the Rhapsody explores obsession and mortality through its contrasting variations and the recurring Dies Irae chant (a traditional Latin funeral dirge). “He was a composer living in political exile, but also in a kind of artistic exile,” says Demirjian. “He was one of the last great figures at the end of the Romantic tradition.”

The work carries particular resonance in Knoxville, where Rachmaninoff gave his final public performances and where the Dies Irae musical motif appears carved into the Rachmaninoff statue in World’s Fair Park.

The Rhapsody will be performed by guest pianist Zlata Chochieva, whose performances are noted for their clarity and command of Russian repertoire. Of Rachmaninoff’s music, Chochieva says, “I just feel so natural playing his music. There is something very close to my heart. It’s demanding, obviously very difficult, but also so pianistic. It feels natural to play his music because he was such a great pianist himself.”