Southampton Concert Orchestra return on Valentines day with “Concerto Sunday” where passion, romance, and musical poetry take centre stage. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, a sweeping symphonic fantasy that captures the tender beauty and tragic intensity of Shakespeare’s most famous lovers. Then, prepare to be moved by Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 — a work born of heartbreak and healing, filled with soaring melodies that have come to define romantic expression in music. Finally the yearning intensity of Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, a work that redefined musical expression with its endless longing and unresolved desire.
Turner Sims, Southampton
Sunday 14th February 2027 - 3:00pm
Ticket Prices: £20
Students & Under 18s £15
The Programme
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Romeo and Juliet – Fantasy Overture
The concert opens with Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, a symphonic fantasy inspired by Shakespeare’s timeless tale of love and fate. From hushed, foreboding opening chords to the fiery clash of family conflict and the soaring theme of young love, the music moves with cinematic intensity.
Tchaikovsky captures both the tenderness and the tragedy of the story, the fragile beauty of Romeo and Juliet’s love set against the storm of events around them. Heartbreak and rapture intertwine, leading to one of the most unforgettable climaxes in the orchestral repertoire.
Sergei Rachmaninov
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor
Few works speak to the heart quite like Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a piece born from despair and renewed artistic strength. After a period of deep creative crisis, Rachmaninov emerged with this concerto, a triumph of lyricism, hope and emotional depth.
From its solemn, tolling opening to the radiant, sweeping themes that follow, the concerto sings with longing and ache, yet also with tenderness and soaring optimism. It has become a defining symbol of romantic expression, a work where vulnerability meets grandeur, and the human spirit rises renewed.
Richard Wagner
Prelude to Tristan und Isolde
The programme concludes with Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, a work that changed the course of Western music. From its famously yearning opening, Wagner suspends us in a world of unresolved desire and unending tension, a musical language of longing that seems always to lean forward, searching, reaching, never quite arriving.
This is love portrayed not as certainty or serenity, but as overwhelming emotion — a restless pull of heart and soul. In its luminous, aching beauty, the Tristan Prelude leaves us suspended in a moment of breathless wonder.