Tucson Symphony Orchestra concert explores music for theater, dance

Good old Shakespeare coined the phrase “all the world’s a stage” as a way to chronicle man’s journey through the seven stages of life.

The Tucson Symphony Orchestra won’t go nearly that deep in their “All the World’s A Stage” concert this weekend. There is no probing look into the psyche of aging or the joys and regrets of a life lived as Shakespeare’s poem does.

Instead the orchestra, in the second installment of the 2019-20 MasterWorks series, is traversing classical music’s connection to the stage, from opera to theater.

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Guest Conductor Aram Demirjian, music director of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and a regular at the podium for the Philadelphia Orchestra, will lead the TSO in a program that goes from Rossini’s deliciously fun and familiar overture to “The Italian Girl in Algiers” to Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 in C major, which borrows liberally from “Il Distratto,” the music Haydn wrote for the play “Le Distrait” by 17th century French poet/playwright Jean-François Regnard.

The program also includes Pulitzer Prize winning composer Caroline Shaw’s “Entr’acte” for strings that was inspired by Haydn and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite, which he was commissioned to write in 1920 for impressario Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

The TSO performs “All the World’s A Stage” at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 9, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 10, at Catalina Foothills High School, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive. Tickets are $46 to $56 through tucsonsymphony.org.