Romeo and Juliet Archive
PROKOFIEV: Romeo and Juliet – Milan La Scala Ballet/Orchestra/Patrick Fournillier – Blu-ray
PROKOFIEV: Romeo and Juliet – Blu-ray Cast: Milan La Scala Ballet [Complete List of Dancers below] Romeo – Roberto Bolle Juliet – Misty Copeland Mercutio – Antonino Sutera Tybalt – Mick Zeni Music: Milan La Scala Orchestra Conductor: Patrick Fournillier Choreographer: Kenneth MacMillan Set Designer: Mauro Carosi Costumes: Odette Nicoletti, Lighting: Marco Filibeck Run Time: 160 minutes DVD Release Date: November 17, 2017 Video: 1.77:1 Color. Audio: Dolby, NTSC, Stereo Subtitles: English, Italian Extras: None Dist: Naxos Rating: ****½ It was originally written with a happy ending. I kid you not. More on that later. If you purchase any ballets this year, you could not do much better than Romeo and Juliet by Serge Prokofiev. It’s energetic, fast-moving, gloriously musical, and riveting to watch. The cast look like they’re all in their lower 20s, except Juliet’s nurse, but like the others she is a real pro. You may be familiar with its justly famous themes like “The Dance of the Knights.” But you may not have heard that theme twist and gyrate in its many altered forms throughout the ballet, like as a leitmotif when the villainous Tybalt appears. The dance scene of the principals’ first […]
Mengelberg conducts TCHAIKOVSKY: Romeo and Juliet Overture; Symphony No. 4; Symphony No. 5; Serenade for Strings – Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam/ Willem Mengelberg – Pristine Audio
Mengelberg conducts TCHAIKOVSKY: The Complete Columbia Recordings, 1927-1930 = Romeo and Juliet – Fantasy Overture; Symphony No. 4 in f minor, Op. 36; Symphony No. 5 in e minor, Op. 64; Waltz from Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48 – Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam/ Willem Mengelberg – Pristine Audio PASC 511 (2 CDs) TT: 2:08:36 [www.pristineclassical.com] ****: Mark Obert-Thorn restores the ardent realizations of the Tchaikovsky legacy the tempestuous Mengelberg recorded for Columbia Records. While auditioning producer and restoration engineer Mark Obert-Thorn’s latest edition of Tchaikovsky works from Willem Mengelberg (1881-1951) for the Columbia label, I recall the several sessions I enjoyed with Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg (1927-1996) at SUNY Binghamton, where he taught for the School of Advanced Technology and occasionally conducted concerts with a mixed ensemble of SUNY players and professionals. Stefan often discussed his great-uncle’s conducting style, founded as it had been in a strongly Romantic, even self-indulgent, tradition. Huge manipulations of tempo and rhythmic pulse, orchestral slides, and shifting of dynamics had been standard performance practice. My own objection to the cuts Mengelberg takes in the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony’s last movement prevented my wanting to broadcast his otherwise splendidly energetic performances, either on Columbia or Telefunken. […]
Serge PROKOFIEV: Romeo and Juliet, Blu-ray
Serge PROKOFIEV: Romeo and Juliet, Blu-ray (2017) Cast: San Francisco Ballet Director and Principal Choreographer: Helgi Tomasson Music: Orchestra of the San Francisco Ballet Conductor: Martin West Stage Director: Glenn McCoy Studio: C Major, Blu-ray. [7/30/2017] Video Director: Thomas Grimm Run Time: 128 minutes Video: 1.77:1 Color. Audio: Dolby, NTSC, Stereo Extras: “Shakespeare Without Words”, “En Garde”, “Children of the San Francisco Ballet” Rating: ***½ Very entertaining and traditional adaptation. This is one of a very fine and promising set of videos from “Lincoln Center at the Movies”, a series of movie house showings of concerts of all genres as well as opera and ballet. I have attended one or two of these and, to be honest, the large screen is a nice experience if one cannot get to an actual live ballet, opera or what have you. However, the resolution and sound in a movie house is never quite as good as you could experience at home by getting a really good quality video such as this. The sight and sound of this very fine performance of the San Francisco Ballet’s 2015 live performance of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet is everything you would want. I have enjoyed all of […]
BELLINI: I Capuleti e i Montecchi (2016)
BELLINI: I Capuleti e i Montecchi (2016) You might want to pass this one up… Performers: Chorus & Orchestra of the Zurich Opera House/ Joyce DiDonato, Olga Kulchynska, Benjamin Bernheim, Roberto Lorenzi/ Fabio Luisi (cond.)/ Christof Loy (stage director)/ Franck Evin (lighting designer) Studio: Accentus Music [9/30/16] Length: 139 min. Video: 1.78:1 for 16:9 screens, color Audio: DTS-HD 5.1, PCM Stereo Subtitles: English, German, French, Japanese Ratings: Audio: *** Video: *** One hopes the best for productions of Vincenzo Bellini’s operas, especially—unlike his Norma and il Puritani—the ones out of the repertoire. They still have marvelous music in them. I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830) is his take on the famous story of Romeo and Juliet, quite different in plotting from Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette (1867). (A contemporary reviewer called Gounod’s opera “always pleasing, though seldom impressive.”) Bellini’s version shimmers like a silver medallion given at an opera-writing competition. Bellini was just establishing his bel canto style and it shines on through. Cast as a “trouser role,” mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato does a splendid job as an indignant and feisty Romeo, more acting than acted upon (unlike Gounod’s Romeo). Olga Kulchynska’s Giulietta is marvelous in several notable arias: her […]
PROKOFIEV: Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, Op. 19; Violin Concerto No. 2 in g, Op. 35; Solo Sonata in D Major, Op. 115 – Vadim Gluzman, v./ Estonian Nat. Sym. Orch./ Neeme Jarvi – BIS
Strong collaborations and incisive sound editing give us fine interpretations of Prokofiev’s major violin works. PROKOFIEV: Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, Op. 19; Violin Concerto No. 2 in g, Op. 35; Solo Sonata in D Major, Op. 115 – Vadim Gluzman, v./ Estonian Nat. Sym. Orch./ Neeme Jarvi – BIS multichannel SACD-2142, 60:21 (8/12/16) [Distr. by Naxos] ****: Ukrainian-Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman (b. 1973) recorded the present Prokofiev works between May 2014 and July 2015, playing upon an extraordinary instrument, the 1690 Stradivarius once owned by pedagogue Leopold Auer. The quality of instrumental tone has an ardent complement in Gluzman’s natural sympathy for the works he performs here with the support of Neeme Jarvi and his veteran Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. The D Major Prokofiev Concerto (1917) still vibrates with a sense of the enfant terrible who wishes to astonish the conservative status quo. Although Nathan Milstein – who premiered the work in Moscow in 1923 – called the music “one of the best modern violin concertos,” many of the elite virtuosos declined to perform it, and it was left to the enterprising Joseph Szigeti to make the first recording with Sir Thomas Beecham. The dreamy first movement […]
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 6 “Pathetique”; Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Ov. – Czech Philharmonic/ Semyon Bychkov – Decca
“The Tchaikovsky Project” from Semyon Bychkov and Decca opens with two tragic scores. TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 6 in b, Op. 74 “Pathetique”; Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture – Czech Philharmonic Orch./ Semyon Bychkov – Decca 483 0656, 63:53 (10/14/16) [Distr. by Universal] ****: Russian-American conductor Semyon Bychkov (b. 1952) embarks on “The Tchaikovsky Project,” an extensive survey of the composer’s major works, including symphonies, concertos, symphonic poems, and incidental music. The present recording (17-19 August and 24-26 September 2015) from Prague’s Dvorak Hall, Rudolfinum, has Bychkov’s leading the Czech Philharmonic, an ensemble well familiar with the Pathetique Symphony by way of work with Vaclav Talich and Lovro von Matacic. The 1893 symphony deliberately courts the theme of mortality, invoking the marking morendo for dynamic phrasing and scoring the dark instrumental colors of the winds and strings. True to his Russian Orthodox heritage, Tchaikovsky quotes the melody of the Orthodox Requiem twice, after the climax in movement one and at the end of movement four. The key relations between movements remain narrow, incremental in half-steps, as though the “mortal coil” had already made its presence felt artistically. Commentators have pointed out that even the seeming dynamic energy and relative freedom of […]
To Keep the Dark Away = Piano music of SCHULMAN, PROKOFIEV, WANGER, SHATIN – Gayle Martin – Ravello
In the course of documenting her friendship with composer Shatin, Gayle Martin drafts several Romantics. “To Keep the Dark Away” = SCHUMANN (arr. Liszt): Widmung; SHATIN: To Keep the Dark Away – Suite of 5 Pieces; Fantasy on St. Cecilia; PROKOFIEV: 5 Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 75; WAGNER (arr. Liszt): Ballade of the Flying Dutchman; Isolde’s Liebestod – Gayle Martin, piano – Ravello RR 7937, 64:38 (7/8/16) [Distr. by Naxos] ***: Pianist Gayle Martin and composer Judith Shatin (b. 1949) have had a creative relationship as far back as 1997, when Ms. Martin performed Ms. Shatin’s Fantasy on Saint Cecilia at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. This disc features that work, along with Ms. Shatin’s piano suite To Keep the Dark Away Dr. Shatin teaches at the University of Virginia, where she heads the Center for Computer Music. Pianist Gayle Martin wishes to impart (rec. 10-11 September 2015 and 5 December 2015) her vision of luminous and numinous experience, and so she seeks out those composers and literary artists who exult in a “secret song” of “emotional fervor.” To be sure, Martin’s rendition of Schumann’s Widmung in the Liszt arrangement proves lyrical and dramatic in its “dedication” […]
PROKOFIEV: Sym. No. 5 in B-flt Major – Royal Concertgebouw Orch. / Mariss Jansons – RCO Live
Chief Conductor Mariss Jansons leads his Concertgebouw Orchestra in a spirited, sonorous reading of the Prokofiev Fifth. PROKOFIEV: Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op. 100 – Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/ Mariss Jansons – RCO Live multichannel SACD 16002, 43:06 [Distr. by Naxos] (4/29/16) ****: Recorded live at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam 17-21 September 2014, the Prokofiev 1944 Fifth Symphony enjoys a performance history in Holland that dates back to 1948, when Eduard van Beinum brought the music before the orchestra. Composed in relative retreat from the cruelties of WW II, the music assumed a colossal import for the composer. Prokofiev said of his Fifth, “I wanted to sing the praises of the free and happy human being—of such a person’s strength, generosity and purity of soul. I cannot say I chose this theme; it was born in me and had to express itself.” From my own first impression of this potent and elegant work – from an RCA recording by Serge Koussevitzky – its combination of militant and lyrical energies struck me with the vigor and resolution of the spirit driving the music in the face of obvious, cataclysmic turmoil. Mariss Jansons does not understate the heroic impulses that emerge in […]
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 5 in e minor; Romeo and Juliet – Fantasy Ov.; SHULMAN: A Laurentian Ov. – NBC Sym./ Guido Cantelli – Pristine Audio
The talented Guido Cantelli appears in 1952 Carnegie Hall for some rousing Tchaikovsky and a rare Shulman performance. TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 5 in e minor, Op. 64; Romeo and Juliet – Fantasy Ov.; SHULMAN: A Laurentian Ov. – NBC Sym./ Guido Cantelli – Pristine Audio PASC 457, 72:08 [avail. in various formats from www.pristineclassical.com] ****: Andrew Rose revives two live concerts from Carnegie Hall featuring Italian virtuoso conductor Guido Cantelli (1920-1956) at the podium, in flamboyant display of his persuasive, interpretative powers. The 1888 Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony did not glean much respect from the NBC’s official leader Arturo Toscanini, but Cantelli maintained a healthy, searching respect for the score. Cantelli remains attentive (1 March 1952) to the perpetual struggle of this “fate” symphony between darkness and light, the tensions between a nervous e minor and E Major in the first movement. No less lyrically tragic, the second movement Andante cantabile moves from b minor to periodic flights of D Major. What makes the first movement especially effective derives from Cantelli’s flexible sense of rhythm and inflected rubato, much in a Romantic style we might associate with Koussevitzky, but less flagrantly epic. The NBC woodwinds – the oboe, clarinet and flute […]
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 5 in E minor and Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture – San Francisco Sym./ Michael Tilson Thomas – SFS Media
Two Tchaikovsky classics ably played and generally well recorded.
Russian Recital by Jorge Federico Osorio = Music of PROKOFIEV, SHOSTAKOVICH, MUSSORGSKY – Cedille
The marvelous Mexican virtuoso Osorio explores the Russians, but we wonder if the Mussorgsky required another grand champion.
PROKOFIEFF: Romeo & Juliet ballet, Blu-ray (2014)
Better image and sound than the MacMillan Royal Ballet production.
PROKOFIEFF: Romeo and Juliet – Complete Ballet – Sym. Orch. of the State Academic Bolshoi Th./ Gennady Rozhdestvensky – Pristine Audio
The restoration of Rozhdestvensky’s complete 1959 version of Prokofiev’s brilliant ballet score is cause for general dancing.
PROKOFIEV: Suite from the ballet Romeo and Juliet for two pianos (trans. by Arthur Ancelle); Suite from the ballet Cinderella for two pianos (trans. by Mikhail Pletnev) – Ludmila Berlinskaya & Arthur Ancelle, pianos – MelodiyaHERMAN GROENEWEGEN: 24 Preludes for Piano – Andrew Clark, piano
Suites for piano from Prokofiev and Herman Groenewegen.
PROKOFIEV: Suite from the ballet Romeo and Juliet for two pianos (trans. by Arthur Ancelle); Suite from the ballet Cinderella for two pianos (trans. by Mikhail Pletnev) – Ludmila Berlinskaya & Arthur Ancelle, pianos – MelodiyaHERMAN GROENEWEGEN: 24 Preludes for Piano – Andrew Clark, piano
Suites for piano from Prokofiev and Herman Groenewegen.
Sir Malcolm Sargent conducts TCHAIKOVSKY: Marche Slav; Romeo and Juliet – Fantasy Overture; Waltz; Theme and Variations from Suite No. 3; 1812 Overture – Royal Philharmonic Orch./ Sir Malcolm Sargent – Guild
The colorful Malcolm Sargent delivers an equally colorful series of Tchaikovsky performances from vintage appearances with the Royal Philharmonic.
Stokowski = RIMSKY-KORSAKOV: Scheherazade; TCHAIKOVSKY: Fantasy Ov. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ – Philadelphia Orch./ Leopold Stokowski – Guild
Live from Philadelphia in 1962, Maestro Stokowski infuses new energy into a pair of his oldest warhorses.
PROKOFIEV: Romeo and Juliet ballet, Blu-ray (2013)
A glorious Blu-ray version of the best production of Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet.
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 6, “Pathetique”; Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Ov. – Swedish Ch. Orch./ Thomas Dausgaard – BIS
Superb playing and sound, but not enough beef.
TCHAIKOVSKY: 1812 Overture; Romeo and Juliet Fantasy; March Slav — London Sym. Orch./Andre Previn – EMI (1972)/ Resonance Recordings (Hi-Q)
An expensive though hearable improvement over other releases of this legendary recording.
MUSSORGSKY: Pictures at an Exhibition; PROKOFIEV: Romeo and Juliet: Ten Pieces, Op. 75; Toccata in D Minor, Op. 11 – Nikolai Demidenko, piano – Helios
Three colossal “standards” of the Russian school find their potent acolyte with Demidenko and his old school virtuosity in 1998 recordings.
Guido Cantelli conducts TCHAIKOVSKY: Romeo & Juliet Ov.; Sym. No. 5 – Pristine
Guido Cantelli delivers Tchaikovsky performances with potent vigor and a degree of elegance that testifies to his classical adherence to form even in the midst of theatrical passion.
Stereotypes Audio
Cembal d’amour
Pure Pleasure / Speakers Corner
Cedille
