Trenton Times previews Shakespeare Winter Festival

The Times of Trenton previews this month’s “Sounds of Shakespeare” Winter Festival:

As the Christmas season's Twelfth Night (Jan. 6) rapidly approaches, the concern, with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra about to offer a veritable banquet of Shakespearean music, is not overindulgence, but rather how to take it all in.

The NJSO will present no less than 10 Bard-inspired works over six concerts in six different venues, Jan. 9-25, as part of this year's Winter Festival, titled "Sounds of Shakespeare." ...

"Shakespeare has been such a major inspiration for many artists," says NJSO music director Jacques Lacombe, whose programming choices were motivated in part by this year's 450th anniversary of the playwright's birth and the upcoming 400th anniversary of his death in 2016. "There's so much repertoire to be done in a festival like this."

The [Jan. 16] Princeton program will include Antonin Dvorak's "Othello Overture," a suite from Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story," with violinist Sarah Chang, and "The Walk to the Paradise Garden" from "A Village Romeo and Juliet" by Fredrick Delius.

Also contributing to the roster of star-crossed lovers will be selections from Samuel Barber's "Antony and Cleopatra," which opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York City, in 1966, and a love duet from a projected opera by Tchaikovsky, based on the subject of "Romeo and Juliet." The sketches were discovered among the composer's papers by a former student, Sergei Taneyev, and incorporate familiar material from his "Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture." ...

The Jan. 10 New Brunswick program will include the overture itself, as part of an all-"Romeo and Juliet" evening, along with selections from Gounod's opera and Prokofiev's ballet.

The Jan. 25 New Brunswick program will feature the "West Side Story Suite," along with Elgar's "Falstaff," and selections from Erich Wolfgang Korngold's incidental music for "Much Ado About Nothing."

The first leg of a two-year project, the Shakespeare festival follows up on Lacombe's four-year exploration of the elements - earth, air, fire and water. Last year, for a Winter Festival concert built on the theme of air and the atmosphere, the orchestra was joined by the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey for selections from "The Tempest," enacted to incidental music composed by Jean Sibelius. The troupe will return for the first weekend of concerts, with works inspired by "Romeo and Juliet." ...

As part of a two-week residency with the orchestra, Sarah Chang will perform a suite from "West Side Story" in an arrangement made specifically for her by David Newman. Newman is a member of a venerable dynasty of Hollywood film composers, including his father, Alfred, his brother, Thomas, and his cousin, Randy.

Chang will also meet and mentor students in NJSO youth orchestras and the El Sistema-inspired NJSO CHAMPS (Character, Achievement and Music Project) ...

Lacombe cites Chang's availability and last season's collaboration with the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey as further incentives for the festival. He is also enthusiastic about the opportunity to juxtapose some of the world's beloved classics with unjustly neglected repertoire.

"That's one of the ideas behind this Winter Festival is also to introduce works from the past that you never hear on stage," he says. "Even the Elgar 'Falstaff,' I've recordings of that but I've never heard that on a concert program. It's a great piece."

Vocal soloists on the concerts are drawn from a talented pool of singers from the Curtis Institute of Music in the Philadelphia.

The NJSO Winter Festivals allow Lacombe to indulge in some multidisciplinary pursuits.

"All the programming kind of reflects different aspects of my activities," he says. "I conduct a lot of opera during the season, so it's there. I enjoy doing that. The ballet music, with the Prokofiev, and collaborating with theater companies, it also reflects a bit of my artistic personality."

Read the full feature.

For more information on the Winter Festival and related events, visit www.njsymphony.org/winterfestival.