Prokofiev’s Wondrous ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Ballet Interrupted by the Bard of Avon
Friday, San Diego Symphony Music Director Rafael Payare continued his presentation of large-scale works to celebrate the orchestra’s return to the renovated Jacobs Music Center with a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64.
Emanuel Ax at the concert grand and Rafael Payare [Photo (c.) Gary Payne]
Written in 1935 as a commission from Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet saw its first performance in the Soviet Union in 1940, and the ballet has subsequently become beloved by dance companies and orchestras across the globe. This production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet was curated by Gerard McBurney, the Symphony’s Artistic Consultant. McBurney selected the portions of the Prokofiev’s extensive score to be performed and also tailored excerpts of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to be spliced into the orchestra’s performance using three actors on stage and the recorded voices of eight other actors. Clearly, the goal was to link the context of Prokofiev’s colorful score to the dramatic action and poetic text of Shakespeare’s play.
Under Payare’s insightful and detailed direction, the orchestra gave a lustrous account of one of the composer’s most lavishly orchestrated and easily accessible scores. This marked the fourth consecutive program Payare has conducted since the Jacobs Music Center reopened in September, and with each concert the orchestra’s sound has continued to flourish and develop in the hall’s significantly improved acoustics. Unfortunately, the structural changes that have made the hall more resonant and more conducive to sustaining a rich orchestral sound worked against the clear projection and perception of the spoken word in the hall. But more about that later.
From the outset of the ballet, Prokofiev expresses the youthful ardor of the ballet’s protagonists with a barrage of dashing themes throughout the orchestra, unabashedly tonal with film score specificity, a genre in which Prokofiev also excelled. Payare maintained the glowing equanimity of the opening sections until the arrival of the ominous, minor-mode theme from the low brass choirs that Payare presented as a chilling march to foreshadow the tragedy that is to come. Delicate strings caress the iconic balcony scene, and pulsing brass and percussion illuminate the fight scene in which Mercutio is killed, followed by another march capped this time with a somber saxophone solo. Romeo’s exile is described in a shimmering celesta solo, and the composer portrays the lovers’ farewell with austere themes of lament and resignation, projected with aching emotional depth by the orchestra. Prokofiev depicts drama’s tragic denouement in elegiac majesty, brought to sublime conclusion by Payare and the orchestra.
Although the musicians and the hall conspired effectively, the actors–Giovanny Diaz de Leon at Romeo, Charlotte McBurney as Juliet, and Robert Sean Leonard as Friar Lawrence and several other roles–failed to make the play’s dialogue understandable in the Jacobs Music Center. Their speech was amplified, but they spoke too rapidly and lacked the precise articulation that an 1800-seat hall with resonant musical acoustics requires. Gerard McBurney’s direction stressed the intensity of impassioned one-on-one conversation, and while this approach works at the much smaller indoor stages of San Diego’s Old Globe Theaters, for example, it was the wrong choice for the Jacobs Music Center. Sitting upstairs one row behind the Grand Tier (the very front of the balcony), I could pick out less than 20% of the spoken dialogue from the actors, who sometimes spoke from the edge of the stage and other times from the choral tier behind the orchestra. Recorded voices portraying smaller roles in the play suffered the same problem of rapid speech, and the recording itself lacked a clear focus.
The combination of the orchestra’s ballet with the actors’ selections from Shakespeare lasted one hour and forty-five minutes. I believe listening to the orchestra’s account of Prokofiev’s ballet alone would have been time far better spent.
Pianist Emanuel Ax is always a welcome guest soloist with the San Diego Symphony, and his performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Major, K. 503, easily fulfilled our expectations of his predictably masterful, elegant, yet impassioned interpretation of music from the Classical period. His most recent San Diego Symphony appearance was in the fall of 2022, when he played Beethoven’s Second Piano Concert under Rafael Payare at the Rady Shell. This infrequently performed Mozart Concerto in C Major suggests the frivolous exuberance of Papageno, that charming character from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, and it entertains with infectious good humor but not much depth. Under Payare’s genial direction, orchestra and soloist gave it a most admirable performance.
This concert was presented by the San Diego Symphony at the Jacobs Music Center in downtown San Diego on Friday, October 18, 2024. It will be repeated in the same venue on October 19 and 20.
Ken Herman, a classically trained pianist and organist, has covered music for the San Diego Union, the Los Angeles Times’ San Diego Edition, and for sandiego.com. He has won numerous awards, including first place for Live Performance and Opera Reviews in the 2017, the 2018, and the 2019 Excellence in Journalism Awards competition held by the San Diego Press Club. A Chicago native, he came to San Diego to pursue a graduate degree and stayed.Read more…
Payare and the orchestra were superb, yes. But both young actors were extraordinary: I’ve seen between 50 and 100 Shakespearian plays in my life (including multiple stage and screen performances of Romeo and Juliet, and actors such as Diana Rigg in King Lear) but I’ve never witnessed a better pair of performers playing the lovers in the Verona tragedy. I was moved to tears. Gerard’s dramatization added tremendously to the experience.
Ken ably describes this marvelous performance under Payare, and Ax was, of course, sparkling at the keyboard. The element of disappointment was that the brave attempt to add dramatic context to inherently descriptive music fell flat for both technical and performative reasons. Sitting in the row just behind Ken, the spoken dialog was largely gibberish to me – at best I picked out a stray word here and there. Wired for modern English, our brains run hot processing Shakespeare under ideal conditions and these were not that. Ken did not mention the accompanying graphic projections and lighting design, however, and I felt these were tasteful, artistic, and complementary. I think the goal of contextualizing the ballet music might have been better achieved by adding suggestive graphic elements to the projected images instead of relying on an overt dramatization that did not fit the hall. Overall, flawed as it was, the effort still was additive to my enjoyment of the music, and probably will serve as a learning experience for those adapting to a new performance space.
I thought it was just me that had trouble hearing the actors. I was sitting in the lower mezzanine and also understood about 20% of the spoken words. Ken said it all when he wrote, “I believe listening to the orchestra’s account of Prokofiev’s ballet alone would have been time far better spent.” Loved Emanuel Ax though!
I am impressed that anyone could understand even 20% of the dialogue. Maybe I caught 5% (that’s being generous). It was too fast, too mumbled, too “shakespearian” (LOL – as another comment mentions, we are not used to listening to this form of English, so it requires extra work). And the performance was SO LONG. If anything else like this is done in future, how about projecting the dialogue onto the screen above the stage? This was utterly inaccessible to anyone with any type of hearing problem (and from the main piece and comments, it seems as if it was not especially accessible even to people WITHOUT hearing problems). I found the acting overwrought and without any emotional resonance other than Mr. Leonard, who is always terrific.
If this particular show is done again, I’d recommend pairing it with something much shorter – perhaps an overture or tone poem – not a concerto.
I usually sit in the orchestra but added this concert last minute and was perched in Row N of the balcony. The sound of the orchestra was magnificent but the Shakespeare was lost. Not only could I not understand, I couldn’t see the actors when they performed at the edge of the stage. I found myself wishing Romeo would die already!
The music would have sufficed! I love our symphony.
I saw the Sunday matinee of Romeo and Juliet, and was seated in the front row of the balcony directly behind the Grand Tier. I could understand almost none of the spoken portions — too fast and too echoing with the amplified sound. The orchestra was superb, but the music was so chopped up throughout the entire work — often into fairly short pieces — that the overall impact of the beautifully performed music was weakened and even lost at times. Chop chop chop, throughout the entire work. As others have noted, I would have far preferred simply to hear the entire musical work uninterrupted.
I was seated in the Grand Tier. Could not comprehend the text, though I have seen the play many times. Please provide on-screen. To me, this Prokofiev’s score is most enjoyable to hear when performed in it’s entirety.
Yes, Ax is a treasure.