Romeo and Juliet, a new orchestral arrangement

[YouOverThere]

My favorite orchestra conductor, Peter Oundjian (music director of the Toronto Symphony and former first violinist for the Tokyo String Quartet), was in Denver this past weekend to guest conduct the Colorado Symphony. The centerpiece of the concert was his own abridged version of Prokofiev's score for Romeo and Juliet. The suites that Prokofiev created from the ballet score were designed to highlight what he felt was the best music in the score and were not intended to be a musical telling of the story. Oundjian's goal was to create a version of Romeo and Juliet that contained the music necessary to tell the story while keeping the length suitable for an orchestral concert (the piece lasted about 55 minutes - and never got tedious). It went over really well with the audience (at least a third of the people who stayed afterwards for the Q&A session had seen the ballet). I'm hoping that they will record it (there were some hints that they want to).

[dirac]

Thank you for taking the time to tell us about the performance, YouOverThere. I'd be very interested to hear this version. I hope they do record it.

[bart]

This music certainly continues to flourish. On another thread a while ago we were discussing the performance of the complete score (as originally intended by Prokofiev) which will be premiered with new choreography by Mark Morris later this year.

P.S. It's good news that such a high percentage of the Q&A audience had seen the ballet itself.

[YouOverThere]

P.S. It's good news that such a high percentage of the Q&A audience had seen the ballet itself.

I'm guessing that the percentage in the total audience would have been much lower.

An interesting side note: Peter Oundjian is a cousin of Monty Pythoner Eric Idle.