Noteworthy

In Shakespeare, youth never ages. Romeo and Juliet still meet at a dead run, still fall in love with a velocity that defies reason, still pay the price before the curtain falls. Centuries later, they remain the purest embodiment of adolescent urgency: reckless, unguarded, unstoppable. For the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, that charge is not just narrative—it is musical. Their November 20–22 program, built around Prokofiev’s ballet, makes the case that classical music can be as immediate, volatile, and uncontainable as young love itself.

The concert, led by Music Director Gustavo Gimeno, combines three works that span almost a century but speak to one another with striking clarity. It begins with Lines, Layers, Ligaments, a TSO Commission from Canadian composer Matthew-John Knights. It continues with Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 3, a piece drawn from his long-suffering opera The Fiery Angel. And it closes with a suite from Romeo and Juliet, specially assembled by Gimeno himself. All of it will be recorded live for Harmonia Mundi, the French label whose partnership with the TSO is already reshaping how the orchestra’s work circulates in the world.

Knights’s presence on the program brings a distinctly contemporary edge. They began as a pianist, starting lessons at 5, and composed almost as soon as they learned to notate. A wrist injury in their undergraduate years forced a pivot from performance to composition. That detour gave them the space to cultivate a style rooted in rhythm and colour, developed under the mentorship of Canadian composers Kelly-Marie Murphy and Dorothy Chang.

Lines, Layers, Ligaments, a recent piece, is both architectural and organic. The title doubles as structure and metaphor. Lines are the melodic threads, layers the harmonies stacked above them, ligaments the transitions that bind them together. Knights imposed a compositional rule: material could return only if it was heard anew, in a different orchestral guise. The effect is one of recognition without repetition, of a landscape that shifts every time you think you know it.

“I want the average concertgoer to have something to hold on to,” Knights says. “But if you peel back the layers there is more there.” That balance—between accessibility and depth, pulse and structure—marks them as part of a generation of Canadian composers intent on building music that resonates with audiences without sacrificing sophistication.

For Knights, the stakes of this concert are personal. Lines, Layers, Ligaments will be their first work preserved in a commercial recording. “It is a great honour,” they say. That honour also carries practical weight: a calling card, a point of entry, a way for future listeners to encounter their work. For a young composer, such a document can shape an entire career.

If Knights provides the spark, Prokofiev brings the blaze. His Third Symphony is an anomaly even in his eclectic catalogue. The work compresses the raw orchestral material of The Fiery Angel, an opera he struggled for years to stage, into a taut 34 minutes of symphonic music. The opera never premièred in his lifetime, but the symphony gave the material new life.

Gimeno calls the piece “weird” and “very original,” descriptions he delivers with admiration. The music lurches between extremes: eerie stillness, pounding rhythms, jagged dissonance, sudden tenderness. Some have compared its relentless drive to early rock music. For Gimeno, who conducted the opera in Madrid, the symphony carries the ghost of its dramatic source. “Sometimes you open a door and you are suddenly in a room you did not expect,” he says. That quality, the sense of constant dislocation, is part of what makes the piece rarely programmed, but also what makes it exhilarating when it is.

The second half of the concert returns to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, one of the 20th century’s most enduring ballets. Audiences usually encounter it in one of three standard suites, each a brilliant patchwork of highlights. Gimeno, however, has taken a different approach. He has built his own longer suite, one that follows Shakespeare’s dramatic arc while also holding together as pure music.

The familiar march “Montagues and Capulets” remains, its stern tread instantly recognizable from countless films and television series. But Gimeno’s version places it within a larger sequence that includes the duels, the love scenes, and the final collapse into silence. The effect is narrative without words, a symphonic rendering of Shakespeare’s tragedy that feels earned rather than episodic.

That curatorial choice is deliberate. It asks the audience to commit to a journey rather than skim highlights. It also sharpens the sense of youth at the story’s core. Romeo and Juliet are, after all, teenagers: impetuous, unprotected, running headlong into history. Under Gimeno, the music embodies that volatility, swinging between tenderness, frenzy, and devastation with unguarded speed.

Both Gimeno and Knights say that the recording raises the stakes. For Gimeno, permanence is the point: music should endure. For Knights, it is a beginning, a way into conversations that extend beyond geography or season. For audiences, it offers the rare chance to hear music in the moment it crosses from event into document.

What ultimately unites the program is not chronology but force. Knights, a composer in their early career, writing with a pulse that insists on movement. Prokofiev, a modernist whose symphony still shocks with its jagged turns. Shakespeare’s teenagers, brought into sound by music that surges forward as if it cannot wait.

Youth in classical music is often reduced to a demographic question: how old the players are, how young the audience might be. This program suggests another definition. Youth here is energy—it’s what happens when music refuses to sit still.

Three nights. One great love story. And a contemporary creation that insists on motion, colour, and connection. If you’ve ever wondered what the symphony can be in 2025, this is the place to find out.

See Romeo & Juliet recorded live for Harmonia Mundi on November 20, 21, and 22, 2025, at Roy Thomson Hall. Get your tickets at TSO.CA/Concerts. 

Written by Jonathan Dekel, an award-nominated journalist and content producer whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, SPIN, Toronto Life, and National Post. A former CBC producer and Game of Thrones set correspondent, he now leads the creative agency Greater Good.