Sir Georg Solti was a welcome guest with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Born in 1912, the Hungarian had carried out decisive development work at the Bavarian National Theatre in the post-war period and was considered one of the world's elite conductors alongside Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan from the 1960s onwards. Georg Solti returned to Munich once again for a special concert by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra on February 10, 1984 in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz. At the height of his career, the then 71-year-old conducted excerpts from Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet and the Fourth Symphony by Peter I. Tchaikovsky. The works of these two Russian composers in particular were in the best hands with him - alongside those of Bruckner and Mahler - because they sounded musically spirited and extraordinarily transparent in sound. Prokofiev's three-act ballet Romeo and Juliet was written in 1935 for the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, where it did not initially have a successful trial performance. The world premiere of this probably most popular Shakespeare story as a narrative ballet did not take place until 1938 in Brno, Czech Republic. The score has a total of 52 numbers; Prokofiev put together three suites, each in six or seven parts, for the concert hall. At the special concert in Munich with Georg Solti in 1984, fifteen numbers of the ballet music were performed in chronological order - from the introduction of the first act to the famous balcony scene and Mercutio's death to the tragic finale. Peter I. Tchaikovsky dedicated his Fourth Symphony, which was composed in 1877/78 at the same time as his opera Eugene Onegin, to his patroness Nadyezhda von Meck, with whom he had a long-standing correspondence without ever having met in person. In a letter to his pen pal dated March 1878, Tchaikovsky outlined the emotions he had felt while composing the Fourth Symphony - from which, however, no exact symphonic program could be derived. He combined musical motifs and themes with such general emotional feelings as the force of fate and dreams of happiness (first movement), melancholy (slow movement), images of fantasy (Scherzo) and joy at the joy of other people (Finale).