Romeo & Juliet

The evening

Love in all its colours, desire, tenderness, loss, and fate, runs through this programme, brought to life by conductor Martyn Brabbins. Debussy’s Prélude à l’après‑midi d’un faune opens the evening with shimmering orchestral colour that hovers between waking and dream. Inspired by Mallarmé’s poem, its sinuous lines and floating harmonies evoke the intoxication of longing and the fragile beauty of moments suspended in time.

From this dream world we turn to more personal expressions of love and loss. We welcome David Childs as soloist in Paul Mealor’s Euphonium Concerto, a work drawn from a Gaelic tale of lost love: a fisherman who never returns, and the voice that continues to sing to the sea. A rarer voice follows in Akimenko’s Angel: Poem Nocturne, shaped by exile and a lifelong return to Ukrainian culture. Drawing on poetry by Lermontov, its romantic impressionist stillness creates a sound world of quiet reflection and spiritual yearning.

After the interval, excerpts from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet bring love’s ecstasy and catastrophe onto the stage with searing intensity. Here, tenderness and rapture are inseparable from violence and fate, as soaring lyricism collides with sharply defined drama.