The Waukegan Orchestra unites music with Shakespeare on Saturday when it presents its opening concert of the season.
The orchestra will celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death by performing pieces including Felix Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and Leonard Bernstein’s music from “West Side Story,” a contemporary “Romeo and Juliet” musical.
The orchestra will perform concerts this season on Saturday nights instead of Sunday afternoons.
“This is an interesting way to find out what musicians have had to say about what Shakespeare wrote,” said the orchestra’s director Stephen Blackwelder. “Shakespeare was all about words and the drama in telling the story through his choice of language. His language was the language of his time. In music, you don’t have to update the language.”
Blackwelder said as a musician, he believes one of his tasks is “to make the case for these great works of art and why they still matter.” As he researched the music, he came to know how many famous composers read Shakespeare’s plays, which influenced some of their works.
Blackwelder said he programmed the music to delight and challenge his players and the audience — giving them something familiar and something adventuresome.
“It is very mixed, but all of the music is tied together by having been inspired by Shakespeare in some way,” except for the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 that will be performed by young artist Joshua Brown of Gurnee. Brown has performed at Carnegie Hall, and Blackwelder considers him a child prodigy.
The concert opens with the Mendelssohn’s overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” written in 1826.
“It’s a bright, light way to open the first half of the concert,” Blackwelder said. Mendelssohn wrote it as a stand-alone piece when he was very young.
“Many years later, as he got to know the rest of the play better, he wrote incidental music for a full theatrical production,” Blackwelder said.
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The group also will perform “Overture to the Merry Wives of Windsor,” an opera written by Otto Nicolai in the middle 1800s.
“It’s the only piece by Nicolai that most folks have heard,” Blackwelder said. He wrote the opera in German based on Shakespeare’s play. “The overture has a lot of charm. It’s classic Viennese music.”
Blackwelder also will conduct two selections from incidental film music written by William Walton for the movie adaptation of “Henry V.” Sir Laurence Olivier asked Walton to write incidental music for some of the films he starred in.
“These are two little pieces of film music, just played by the string orchestra. They’re quiet and intimate pieces that reflect two different occurrences in the film,” Blackwelder said.
Blackwelder enjoys discovering new music to perform for each concert — and he found a new piece he’d never directed before, Hector Berlioz’s “King Lear.”
“Berlioz was a very interesting composer. He did things in the 19th century that people wouldn’t dare do. He was a real visionary,” Blackwelder said, adding Berlioz studied and attended Shakespearean plays.
“King Lear was very individual, highly strung, and eventually goes kind of crazy. He’s a man Berlioz could relate to. I found this piece, when I was looking for my Shakespeare theme. I’ve heard of it. I never heard it, so I ordered a copy of the score. I found some recordings — and I said, ‘This is early Berlioz.’ As you listen to ‘King Lear,’ you hear some of those ideas start developing in Berlioz’s mind, which means strange choices and changes of rhythm, really strange changes in harmony. The more I studied the piece, the more I thought this is a great piece for the Waukegan Symphony to play.
Blackwelder will end the concert with selections from Leonard Bernstein’s music to “West Side Story.”
“It was an absolute natural,” he said. “Not only does everyone like Bernstein, but it’s taking the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ story from Shakespeare and putting it into New York City.”
The arrangement features familiar tunes and ends with high energy, he said.
Sheryl DeVore is a freelance reporter for the News-Sun.
Waukegan Symphony Orchestra: Music for the Bard
When: 7 p.m. Saturday
Where: Waukegan High School Trapp Auditorium, 2325 Brookside Ave., Waukegan
Tickets: $8-$15; Students 18 and under are free
Information: 847-360-4740 or www.waukegansymphony.org