The tale of Romeo and Juliet as told in Shakespeare’s play has inspired artists, writers, and composers for centuries. Even Shakespeare himself was inspired by earlier 16th century Italian sources, which were in turn part of a tradition of tragic romances that reaches into classical antiquity. Shakespeare’s version is thought to have been written between 1591and 1595, and in the world of music alone, has spawned no less than 24 operas and countless other works. Perhaps most famous among those are Tchaikovsky’s

In the early 20th Century, British composers like Vaughn Williams, Butterworth, and Holst worked to develop a distinctly British style and sound different from the German and French traditions that had so dominated 19th Century romanticism. They turned to the modalities of English folk song and sought inspiration in the works of the great composers of the English renaissance. These earlier composers often worked in a form called a fantasy, or phantasy. These pieces were most often for groups of viols

The music of Dmitri Shostakovich, like that of most composers, touches on the full gamut of human emotions, and this should not be surprising. But for those of us who lived a good portion of our lives during the cold war, pieces like his Festive Overture, with its bright enthusiasm, and his musical comedy Cheryomushki, which lampoons life in a soviet apartment block, may not be what we expect form an Eastern Block composer. There is another side to his output