Legends of Cyprus - Othello

Cyprus and Shakespeare’s “Othello” form the thematic starting point for this album featuring the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor, Nimrod Borenstein. Borenstein’s “Legends of Cyprus,” composed for the orchestra in 2025, opens the program. The single-movement work combines diverse orchestral timbres and emotional characters and is intended as a musical exploration of Borenstein’s engagement with contrasting sound worlds.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music for a 1909 London stage production of Shakespeare’s “Othello” was compiled into a five-movement orchestral suite three years later. Antonín Dvořák’s concert overture “Othello” also draws upon Shakespeare’s tragedy: the work, composed in 1892, forms the third part of his “Nature, Life and Love” cycle and, with its dramatic structure, already approaches the tone poem. Franz Schubert’s incidental music for “Rosamunde” (Princess of Cyprus) rounds out the program with the famous “Entr’acte No. 3” and “Ballet No. 2.”

The Cyprus Symphony Orchestra performs under the direction of Nimrod Borenstein.