Romeo and Juliet - First & Second Suites

SERGEI PROKOFIEV composed his famous ballet Romeo and Juliet in 1935, having returned to Russia from the United States. The fate of this work is indicative of both Prokofiev’s own life and the entire situation in the country at the time. The composer received the commission from the then Sergey Kirov Leningrad Theatre of Opera and Ballet and together with director Sergei Radlov and playwright Adrian Piotrovski created synopsis of the dramatic plot for the ballet, and wrote the music. The original scenario envisioned a happy ending, radically departing from the finale of Shakespeare's illustrious tragedy, but this version was not produced on stage since the censorship insisted on the original tragic ending. At the beginning of 1936, the Pravda published its notorious editorials against Shostakovitch: Muddle Instead of Music (about the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk district) and Ballet Falsehood (about his ballet The Limpid Stream), which became instrumental in changing the entire atmosphere around artists in Stalin's Russia. As a result, Prokofiev and his co-authors had to correct the script and restored the traditional ending of the tragedy. However, the contract with the Kirov theatre was not fulfilled and the commission for the ballet passed to the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre, which, however, in the aftermath of the aggressive campaign orchestrated by Stalinist cultural policy against a number of Russian composers, also canceled the production. The situation deteriorated as one of the authors of the libretto – Adrian Piotrovsky, was executed by shooting in 1937 and his name had to be stricken off from all documents. The premiere (in an abridged version) took place only in December 1938 at the Brno National Theater, in the absence of Prokofiev. It was several years before the work was allowed to be shown on Russian scene in the choreographic production of the famous ballet master Leonid Lavrovsky, who made a new version of the ballet. The 1940 premiere performance at the Leningrad Kirov Theatre passed with great success, with Galina Ulanova and Konstantin Sergeyev in the lead roles. From that moment on, the ballet's triumphal journey on the most prominent stages around the world commenced, in the performance of celebrated dancers. On July 4, 2008, with the approval of the Prokofiev family and permission from the Russian State Archive, famous American choreographer Mark Morris produced the original 1935 score, restoring the original instrumentation, the four-part structure and the happy ending. The work was performed by the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Leon Botstein. The production subsequently embarked on a one-year tour to include Berkeley, Norfolk, Chicago and London. From the music of his celebrated ballet Prokofiev extracted, even before the first stage production had taken place, two orchestral suites, each of them consisting of seven episodes. The first suite was performed in Moscow in November 1936, under the direction of Georges Sébastian (a French conductor of Hungarian origin, who had at the time been the conductor of the All-Union Radio Symphony Orchestra for several years), and the second premiered in 1937 under the direction of the author in Leningrad. In 1946, Prokofiev completed a third orchestral suite, produced in that same year in Moscow with conductor Vladimir Degtyarenko.