Loosely based on Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story became a cultural phenomenon. Leonard Bernstein’s score was a defining moment in musical theatre and its sensational songs — ‘America’, ‘Maria’, ‘Tonight’, ‘Somewhere’ — still thrill more than 60 years after the work’s premiere.

It has a strong personal resonance, too, for period performance pioneer Sir John Eliot Gardiner, for whom Bernstein was a formative influence early in his career.

He conducts an augmented Broadway theatre scoring as Bernstein originally intended, with a young, hand-picked cast from Scotland and America and special guest instrumentalists drawn from the worlds of jazz and musical theatre.