When Prokofiev finished
writing Romeo and Juliet it was
expected that it would be immediately
performed by the Bolshoi ballet company;
however, the company rejected the work
for several reasons. The original version
had a happy ending where Romeo arrives
and finds Juliet alive and the two lovers
dance a joyous reunion finale. When
news of this leaked out, it caused a
storm of protest, surprisingly more
in Russia than in England, and after
conferring with the dancers, who felt
the finale music actually wasn’t all
that joyous anyway, the scenario and
music were revised to the version we
know today, where the original tragic
ending is preserved and Romeo dances
with Juliet’s dead body. However, the
overall work still did not please and
the rejection held.
In the hope of arousing
interest in performing the work, Prokofiev
extracted two suites from the score
as it existed then, including the new
music for Shakespeare’s original ending,
and these were widely performed and
widely accepted. Partly as a result,
the whole work was performed in Czechoslovakia
in 1938. With their insistence that
the work was "undanceable"
disproved by a foreign company the Russians
were shamed and the Kirov company immediately
began planning for a full Russian production.
However a number of revisions were made
to the score; some dances were added
and the orchestration was revised to
suit the acoustics of the hall so the
dancers could hear the music better.
The ballet proved to
be an overwhelming success and there
remained a demand for more concert music,
so Prokofiev extracted Suite #3
from the score as it then existed. The
three suites make up a substantial concert
program, yet still less than half the
length of the full ballet. For a true
collector, the fact that the orchestration
of the numbers in the Suites 1 and 2
is different from that of the same dances
in the published score of the full ballet
means that one must have both the full
ballet and the suites to have all the
music. It can be argued that the orchestration
in the suites is superior to that in
the ballet because it was the composer’s
original conception, not changed in
reaction to practical staging considerations.
One might prefer to
have a video performance of the whole
ballet rather than a CD of excerpts,
but unfortunately the video performances
I’ve seen seem to have a sound quality
inversely proportional to their dance
performance quality, so I don’t know
any other course than to have one recording
of the music and a separate video recording
of the dance. There are several good
CD versions of the complete ballet score
on two CDs but that might be more of
this work than a collector wants to
pay for or listen to at one sitting
and, of course, all the music would
be with the later orchestration.
Hence a this disk could
be just what many collectors are looking
for, particularly in its SACD incarnation,
which I have not yet had the pleasure
of hearing. Sound and performance on
this CD are both excellent, as good
or better than the best I’ve heard.
As I mentioned in my biography
of Prokofiev, his scores so clearly
express his intentions and his exotic
sounds are accomplished by such simple
and direct means that differences in
both quality and style from one performance
to the next are minor. Lest anyone think
that the Cincinnati SO is less than
first rate, let it be remembered that
it is the oldest Orchestra in the region
and was the first orchestra where Leopold
Stokowski was music director.
Paul Shoemaker
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra/Paavo Järvi
