Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester

No other love story has left such a deep mark on our culture as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, arguably the greatest love story in world literature. The power of the material is evident in the numerous operas and symphonic settings that have been created, and the story has also been adapted for the musical stage by Leonard Bernstein in West Side Story. It continues to be adapted for the cinema time and again. Sergei Prokofiev set 'Romeo and Juliet' to music in a grand ballet score, which he later adapted into three orchestral suites. This concert features a suite compiled by Ukrainian-Russian conductor Anna Rakitina from Prokofiev's ballet music and the three suites.

William Shakespeare also wove a love story into his A Midsummer Night's Dream, that of the fairy king Oberon and his wife Titania. This story also forms the basis of Carl Maria von Weber's romantic opera Oberon. The mysterious call of the magic horn with which the knight Hüon summons the fairy king Oberon opens the opera's overture, and the melody of Oberon's great aria 'Von Jugend auf' is entrusted to the clarinet. This overture alone is testament to Weber’s mastery of instrumentation, as he drew new colours entirely from the wind instruments.

Weber had a particular fondness for the clarinet, evident not only in his operas, but also in his instrumental music. He dedicated two concertos and a concertino to the instrument, as well as chamber music pieces such as a clarinet quintet. The soloist in the first of these clarinet concertos is Daniel Ottensamer, principal clarinettist of the Vienna Philharmonic.
(Frankfurter Museums-Gesellschaft e.V.)