Between Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Prokofiev, the two Russian composers whose orchestral works re-imagined William Shakespeare’s tragic love story, guest conductor Andrés Cárdenes chose the latter to launch the Butler County Symphony Orchestra’s first performance of 2024 on Saturday, Feb. 3.

For one, he said, Tchaikovsky “has been played quite a bit,” and the intrigue of “Romeo and Juliet” translates to Prokofiev’s dramatic and “edgy” style.

“There are many, many stories like Romeo and Juliet by many composers and many literary writers,” Cárdenes said. “But the music by Prokofiev is extremely dramatic, and that highlights so many different kinds of moods — not only the tragedy of the death of Juliet in this particular suite that I put together, but also the death of Tybalt, which is very dramatic.”

From the Globe Theatre to Broadway, adaptations of “Romeo and Juliet” have sprung up into a present-day “renaissance” of Shakespeare’s play, said Cárdenes, who holds the Dorothy Richard Starling & Alexander Speyer Jr. Endowed Chair at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Music.

For the guest conductor, the music is the most compelling part of the story.

“When you're reading a book, you're imagining the events as they unfold,” Cárdenes said. “But when you're listening to a version of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ the content is immediate and powerful, and it's also overwhelming at times because for instance, Romeo at Juliet’s grave — this movement that I selected in the suite that I put together — is so overwhelmingly, powerfully despondent, that, you know, you can maybe imagine it when you're reading it, but to actually hear a depiction of it, the music is extremely powerful.

“You can feel this complete devastation as (Romeo) stands by (Juliet’s) grave and that's something that's very hard to replicate in any other form. It can be replicated visually as well in ballet. But the ballet by itself — without the music — is not nearly as overwhelming or as compelling. The music really brings an element that hopefully connects the audience with the story.”

Without music, the symphony marketing director Herb Nichol said many of the dramatic productions and their adaptations — including “Romeo and Juliet” — wouldn’t be the same.

“Music adds to the drama, it adds to the mood,” Nichol said. “I think music reaches you on an emotional level that straight dialogue doesn’t.”

Chris Savannah, director of board development and a bassoonist, said her favorite movement in the composition is the “Death of Tybalt.” In the scene, Juliet’s cousin is killed by Romeo in a street brawl in retribution for killing Romeo’s friend.

“It's very, very exciting,” Savannah said, describing the music. “The violins are sweating it right now, like, they're working very hard right now to learn that music.”

“The Death of Tybalt” is gut-wrenching, Cárdenes said.

“You can tell by the music — even without seeing anything on a stage — you can just feel and imagine a body being carried out off the stage, you know,” he said. “There’s wailing and screaming in the music as well. So you can imagine the people that witnessed this and the soldiers carrying him away and you can you can visualize all this through music.”

When asked how the music translates to modern audiences, Savannah said “classics never go out of style.”

“If you think of classic dress or classic architecture or classic anything, it's something that doesn't go out of style, and that's what classic music is,” she said. “We use the word ‘classical’ a lot. And I'd like to shorten it to classics because classical was an actual era of music from the 1700s.”

Classical music has shaped nearly all American contemporary music, she said, from pop to jazz.

“People want to hear those melodies again that they've heard before,” Savannah said. “And then they hear new melodies, something that's new and that hits their emotions in a different way.”

Nichol, a former English teacher at Moniteau High School, likened “the classics” in music to influential literature.

“You're looking at somebody like William Shakespeare, and many people don't realize he's so much a part of our lives — a lot of our expressions that we have today, we're quoting Shakespeare and we don't even realize,” he said. “So much of what we have today is based on a lot of the plays that he wrote, and then you marry that with classical music, and I think it just kind of all comes together. It just dovetails into itself.”

On Saturday, the symphony’s audience will hear Prokofiev’s orchestral work flanked by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Russian Easter Festival Overture” and Reinhold Glière’s “Concerto for Harp.” Rimsky-Korsakov wrote music for the Russian Tsar, while Glière was lauded as a nationalist composer, Cárdenes said. Their backgrounds contrast with the later composer Prokofiev, whose music was censored by the Soviet Communist regime in the 20th century, and whose death was overshadowed by Josef Stalin’s when he died the same day as the dictator.

While Prokofiev stands out historically in comparison to the other two composers, musically, the excitement builds from one piece to the next — Cárdenes described the music in the all-Russian program as “hair-raising.”

In addition, Glière’s harp concerto will spotlight Cárdenes’ daughter Isabel, who is a harpist and undergraduate student at the Manhattan School of Music.

“You hear (the harp) in the orchestra all the time, in the ”Nutcracker Suite“ or ”Swan Lake“ or you hear it in Wagner operas or Puccini operas,” he said. “But now we're putting the harp front and center — so that's really unusual.”

In making the program his own, Cárdenes said he arranged two of the three ballet suites from Prokofiev’s movements to create a collection of his favorite selections from “Romeo and Juliet.”

Of all the different components that go into putting the program together, Cárdenes said, he first thinks about what the audience would enjoy listening to.

“I hope that when the concert is over, (the audience) feels very proud of their orchestra,” Cárdenes said. “I want them to feel that this community and this orchestra, they are connective tissues, that they can feel proud and enlightened by having a cultural organization that brings humanity and civilization to a world that we all know is falling apart.”

“Music never stopped a war,” he said. “It didn't necessarily stop a conflict. But it does add the one thing that we forget when we're in conflict or when we're polarized: that is, a unifying force. (Music) is a force for all peoples.”