Watch: Music Director Jacques Lacombe talks Winter Festival

Next week, Music Director Jacques Lacombe and the NJSO open the 2016 Winter Festival, Sounds of Shakespeare, with a program pairing Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and its rarely performed sequel, the epic Lélio, which features three vocal soloists, chorus, actor and piano. In a special moment, Lacombe will step off the podium to provide piano accompaniment during a Lélio ballad.

Watch the music director share his thoughts on the program and his first time performing piano with the NJSO:

Lélio features Dave Quay as the title character, tenor Philippe L’Esperance as Horatio, tenor Joshua Sanders as the Imaginary Voice of Lélio and baritone Timothy Murray as the Captain, with stage direction and translation by Gus Kaikkonen. These performances mark not only the NJSO premiere of the Berlioz work but also a number of other firsts—the three soloists and the Symphonic Chorus of Manhattan School of Music make their NJSO debuts, and the concerts are the first to feature the Orchestra’s music director at the piano.

The 2016 Winter Festival concludes a two-season cycle celebrating music inspired by Shakespeare. Berlioz drew inspiration from the Bard in each of the opening program’s two works. The fourth movement of Symphonie fantastique conjures the Witches’ Sabbath from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Berlioz drew inspiration for the finale of the symphony’s sequel, Lélio, from The Tempest.

NJSO Accents include post-concert talkbacks with Berlioz expert Dr. Mark A. Pottinger, chair of the Visual & Performing Arts Department at Manhattan College; Pottinger chats about Berlioz’s eccentricities and how the elements of his life and his love of Shakespeare culminate in these two works (January 23 and 24).

The festival finale (January 29–31) features the Orchestra’s biggest collaboration with celebrated artistic partner The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey to date. Actors will perform an abridged version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, paired with Mendelssohn’s incidental music inspired by Shakespeare’s comedy.

Learn more at www.njsymphony.org/winterfestival.