“Romeo and Juliet,“ op. 64: Excerpts

Program notes

About the Work

Romeo and Juliet grew out of negotiations with the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad in 1934, and Prokofiev wrote most of the score in 1935, after a contract had been signed with Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. But the road to the stage was tortuous. Neither theatre staged it at first, and Prokofiev’s original ending, in which the lovers survive (because, as he later explained, “living people can dance, the dying cannot”), provoked controversy and was eventually replaced by Shakespeare’s tragic conclusion. The full ballet finally received its world premiere on 30 December 1938 not in Russia but at the Mahen Theatre in Brno, Czechoslovakia. The Soviet premiere followed at the Kirov on 11 January 1940, with the legendary Galina Ulanova as Juliet, a performance that immediately entered the history of dance.

Aware that the full ballet was unlikely to enter the international repertoire quickly, Prokofiev extracted three orchestral suites (two in 1936, a third in 1946) and a set of piano pieces from the score. Conductors today often assemble their own selections from these suites and from the complete ballet, and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s evening combines ten numbers into a single dramatic arc that follows the tragedy from its first violent confrontation to its devastating conclusion.

The most famous moment in the score, The Montagues and the Capulets, is one of the most instantly recognisable passages in twentieth-century music. It opens with colossal dissonant chords representing the Prince of Verona’s furious decree against further bloodshed. Then comes the Dance of the Knights: that pounding, menacing tread of low strings and brass, music so iconic that television and advertising have borrowed it again and again. Listen for the delicate middle section, where Juliet dances with Paris.

Throughout, listen for Prokofiev’s gift for character: the quicksilver music that paints Juliet as a Young Girl, a teenager surprised by her own emotions; the breathless lyricism of the Balcony Scene, in which a single soaring melody for the strings carries the weight of all first love; and the shattering orchestral grief that closes the work, as Prokofiev gives Shakespeare’s most heartbreaking final scene a sound world of unbearable tenderness.

Tonight’s Artists

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Conductor

Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, born in Vilnius in 1986, makes her Berliner Philharmoniker debut with these concerts, a moment many in the music world have been waiting for since her rise began over a decade ago. The daughter of a choral conductor father and a pianist-singer mother, she initially trained in painting and French at the M. K. Čiurlionis School of Art in Vilnius before deciding, at age eleven, that music was her calling. She subsequently studied in Graz, Leipzig, and Zurich.

Her career trajectory has been extraordinary. After winning the Salzburg Young Conductors Award in 2012 and serving as a Dudamel Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she was appointed Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 2016, the first female conductor ever to hold that historic post. In 2019 she became the first female conductor in the history of Deutsche Grammophon to sign an exclusive recording contract; her debut album for the label, devoted to the music of Mieczysław Weinberg, won the Gramophone Recording of the Year award in 2020. Weinberg’s music is one of the central artistic threads of her career, and she is widely regarded as one of the leading champions of his rediscovery, which makes her programming choice for tonight’s debut especially meaningful. A small curiosity: her surname “Tyla,” which she added herself, is the Lithuanian word for stillness, calm and silence.

Emanuel Ax, Piano

Emanuel Ax, born in Lviv in 1949 to Polish-Jewish parents who had survived the Nazi concentration camps, has been one of the most beloved pianists in the world for half a century. The family emigrated to Winnipeg before settling in New York in 1961, where Ax studied piano with Mieczysław Munz at Juilliard and earned a degree in French from Columbia. His international career took off when he won the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv in 1974, followed by the Avery Fisher Prize in 1979.

A multiple Grammy Award winner, Ax is celebrated equally for his solo recitals, his chamber music partnerships (most famously with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, with whom he won Grammys for recordings of Brahms and Beethoven) and his concerto performances with the world’s leading orchestras. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates from Yale and Columbia. Tonight’s performance carries a particular personal significance: it was Ax himself who told John Williams, then in his nineties, “If you write it, I will play it!” The Piano Concerto on tonight’s programme exists, quite literally, because Emanuel Ax asked for it.