Overview

Prokofiev’s ballet music for Romeo and Juliet is every bit as singular as the Shakespeare tragedy that inspired it: Savage and sensual, tragic and comic, it conveys all the passion of the play and loses none of its ambiguity. Debuting French conductor Marie Jacquot leads the Orchestra in the first SF Symphony performances of Andromède, by her underrated fellow countrywoman Augusta Holmès. The symphonic poem infuses ancient Greek myth with Wagnerian grandeur. Inspired by the music of early Christianity, Ottorino Respighi pulls off medieval plainsong with 20th-century pizzazz in his spellbinding Concerto gregoriano. Japanese violinist Sayaka Shoji summons up all of its enormous expressive power.