Romeo & Juliet for Orchestra & Actors
Music by Ray Leslee * Text by W. Shakespeare
Commissioned by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and performed at Buffalo's Kleinhans Hall, conducted by Jack Everly.
The New Haven Symphony Orchestra performed excerpts at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, conducted by Jung-Ho Pak. Back To Home
DEMO
CHORUS: David Margulies
ROMEO: Harold Perrineau
JULIET: Isabel Keating
(MIDI Synth orchestra)
with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra
The Buffalo News (review)
by Herman Trotter
(reprinted in the American Record Guide, Jan, 2001)
In a cross-cultural embrace, the Buffalo Philharmonic went to bat for a theatrical company this past summer, commissioning a new work to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Shakespeare in Delaware Park Festival, which from its outset has been one of the city's prime alfresco artistic attractions. The festival had been the brainchild of Saul Elkin, chairman of the State University of New York at Buffalo's theater department. For the first 15 years, he had tapped New York composer Ray Leslee to write and direct the incidental music for these Shakespeare productions.
The orchestra, logically, turned to Leslee to produce a work to be premiered as a salute to the festival's 25th anniversary. Appropriately sticking with Shakespeare and invoking the human voice, Leslee composed a piece called Romeo and Juliet for Orchestra and Actors.
The work is in four parts: the flavor of the times, Romeo's desultory mood until he meets Juliet, the famed balcony and love scenes, and the concluding banishment of Romeo and the lovers' death scene.
Leslee's music is of a transparent beauty, steering clear of the heavier drama of Prokofieff's ballet score and the melodramatic-languorous quality of Tchaikovsky's ubiquitous Overture-Fantasy on the same subject. In no sense is Leslee's music derivative, but it does speak with the sweetness and lyricism of Leonard Bernstein's better romantic utterances--combined, perhaps, with the openness and folk simplicity of Milhaud in his Provencal mood. Among the work's distinguishing features are frequent lyrical solo lines with light orchestral undergirding, delicious interplay of woodwinds, and memorable motivic patterns repeated with ostinato-like emphasis. In the culminating tragedy the drama unfolds over the persistent, plodding tread of a bass drum and triangle whose endless repetition creates tension without heaviness.
Above all, Leslee's music is almost continually melodious, with the dramatic turning points enhanced by spiritually satisfying key modulations lifting or lowering the music's plane of repose. This seemed a significant enough premiere to warrant more than the single performance scheduled by the orchestra.