“It’s not a rock opera. It’s a new thing.”
Rock god Elvis Costello moulds his songs with an abundance of styles and musical influences, from punk pop and new wave to jazz to country and folk.
As far back as the early 1990s, he too fell under the spell of classical music. With the Brodsky string quartet, he wrote a number of letters to Juliet Capulet, Shakespeare’s greatest love heroine. It was a cycle of songs about love, life and death, and its recording has grown into a real cult album.
An album that we gladly hand over to Sioen, our Costello-for-the-occasion. Sioen has already released a few series of piano pieces onto the city of Ghent with his swinging project ‘123-Piano’. He’s responsible for subdued classics and for songs as strong as mountains. His elastic voice can take on the most diverse of genres.
For The Juliet Letters, we surround him with hip birds from the Dutch Matangi Quartet. The four musicians are models of a new generation of classical music: communicative, challenging and refreshing. Sioen and the quartet work together for the first time on the initiative of Ghent Festival of Flanders. Costello’s stunning songs are without doubt in the most capable of hands!
