Last night I was describing the musical work of the painter Norman Perryman to some artistic friends who were young in the 1960s. "That's rock'n'roll!" they declared. It is. And it's also going to rock Symphony Hall Birmingham next Saturday, when Perryman and his projectors join the CBSO and Mirga Gražynitė-Tyla to perform The Sea by the composer and artist Mikolajus Čiurlionis, Lithuania's most celebrated artistic figure, one whose music is hardly ever heard in the UK – though Mirga, herself Lithuanian, is about to change all that. Čiurlionis's combination of musical and visual artistry makes him the perfect outlet for Perryman, who creates "kinetic painting" live in concert.
Video trailer for Saturday from the CBSO:
As I have adored Norman's work for years, yet never before had the chance to see him in action in a top UK concert hall, I thought we should ask him for a guest blog. He has kindly provided one, so here it is. JD
SEEING IS BELIEVING
A guest post by Norman Perryman
“What? Are you crazy? Have you ever done this before?”
“Yes, for 45 years or so.”
For years, I’ve been trying to verbalize what I do – create a hybrid art-form of flowing colours and light in synch with the music. Unlike a framed static painting, this painting only exists in real time – for as long as the music lasts. Instead of using computer-generated images, I use my hands, as musicians do. My instrument is my paintbrush. I don’t just improvise. I memorize the score, mark it up with my choreography for brushstrokes and colours, then practise for months before the performance.
Rather than synthetic pixelated images, I prefer pure analogue fields of flowing colour that touch our emotions with their organic properties. When these watercolours are magnified with my overhead projectors onto a ten-metre wide screen as I paint, they acquire an other-worldly quality. But words fail me - seeing is believing.
Every day now in my studio, as I practise my lyrical expressionist painting for a performance of the symphonic poem The Sea, by Lithuania's national hero the painter/composer M.K.Čiurlionis (1875-1911), I feel deeply moved. By the end of this 35-minute piece I’m almost in tears, with a sense of having plumbed the depths of his “boundless longing” for a sublime mystical experience with Nature. After months of work, his music is in my blood, in my ears, day and night. I feel we know each other. It’s time now to show this to the world.
Widely regarded as one of the precursors of European modern art, Čiurlionis was steeped in the cultural philosophies of his day, in his case visualized in hundreds of paintings of mystic symbolic landscapes, seascapes and fantastic architecture. It would be totally inappropriate to try to imitate his paintings. Instead, I take my inspiration from his music to show in my own style of painting, how visual and emotional his music is. Had he lived longer, he might have become one of the early film composers, who knew how to underscore the drama of the movies. I myself underline the emotions of the music with my own movies of abstract lyrical images.
I shall never forget the moment when two years ago the new Lithuanian CBSO Music Director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla flipped through one of my heavily marked-up scores and exclaimed: ”Aha… you paint the music!” Then, after 20 seconds fast-forwarding through a video-trailer of my Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, she looked at me very thoughtfully and said: “We must work together, with Čiurlionis”. The obvious choice for my fluid watercolours was The Sea. I spent the following summer travelling in Lithuania, to soak myself in its rich culture and nature. I felt I was in the very heart of Europe. That visit and following studies played an essential part in my understanding of The Sea and of the amazing man who wrote it.
How did it all start? As a Birmingham art-college student in the early 1950s, I couldn’t afford lunch, so my lunch-times were spent at free concerts given by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra just across the road in the Town Hall. I was wrestling with the choice of studying music or art. My compromise was to dedicate my life to finding a way of satisfying two passions, by bringing these art-forms together. Forty years later, it was the visionary Simon Rattle who recognized my ambition. He suggested working together with his CBSO and in 1993 BBC Television filmed the results in the documentary entitled Concerto for Paintbrush and Orchestra. Since then, after 25 years of performances worldwide, it feels like coming home to be back in Symphony Hall, this time via a pathway that led to Lithuania, of all places.
But I was also appalled with the realization of how tragic and complex the history of Lithuania is, despite having been the largest and one of the most prosperous countries in Europe. Many of us are ignorant of the significance of this tiny country and of the many cultural heroes it has produced. Did you know that Jascha Heifetz, Philip Glass, Bob Dylan, Sean Penn, Leonard Cohen and our celebrated author Jessica Duchen, to name just a few, all have Lithuanian roots? [another story, that - JD]
It’s been a long road, so this performance with Mirga and her CBSO in Birmingham Symphony Hall on 16 February, Lithuania’s Independence Day, is a huge milestone for me. I’m proud to play a modest part in the ongoing cultural renaissance of the city where I was born.
Listening on the radio to the splendid Proms debut of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla with her CBSO the other night, I couldn't help a smile or ten. Cometh the hour, cometh the woman: with a performance like that, wonderfully sculpted, full of conviction, detail and blazing emotion, it couldn't be clearer that the orchestra has snapped her up because she is a fantastic conductor, not because she is female in an era when (at last) equality is being demanded. UK listeners can hear the concert on the iPlayer here. It's also clear that quite a few people haven't much idea of where Lithuania is, or why it should produce such an excellent musician.
When Lithuania and the other Baltic states joined the EU in 2004, I was lucky enough to be invited over to the Vilnius Festival to write some articles about the place, its musical scene and its artistic history - and to do some roots-finding at the same time, as my ancestors were from there in the 18th century. Concerts were held in the beautiful Filharmonja, where Heifetz - who was born in Vilnius - made his debut as a child; and in there I heard an astonishing performance of the Tchaikovsky 'Pathétique' Symphony, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich. It was an absolute glory: gut-wrenching stuff, with old-school Russian-style strings and distinctive vinegary trumpets, sizzling narrative, epic-scale tragedy: music as a matter of life and death.
Vilnius has a proud and distinguished musical life; it's had its problems over the decades, of course, but the influences run deep and come from powerful origins. That's Mirga's background. (She must have been about 18 when I went there, of course...)
It seems worth revisiting those thoughts, so here's the briefish blogpost about it; and below I am pasting the article I wrote then for The Strad, 2004. (It may be missing some accents and suchlike, I'm afraid.) Pics are mine, from then.
The Vilnius Filharmonja
LITHUANIA by Jessica Duchen - from THE STRAD, 2004
Local legend has identified, on a hillside in the Old Town
of Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, an unmarked site of pilgrimage for violinists.
Surrounded by the tumbledown remains of what was long ago the Vilna Ghetto,
ripe for redevelopment amid the turmoil of change underway all around, stands
the birthplace of Jascha Heifetz – its yellowish brick and the wooden stables
in its back yard probably unchanged since the day Vilna’s greatest prodigy made
his debut at the Filharmonja concert hall, aged seven.
Apparently this is Jascha Heifetz's birthplace
Part of the Baltic territory that over the centuries has
been carved up between surrounding powers in a variety of ways, Lithuania is
home to a proud and impressive musical tradition, bearing important influences
from both its heftier neighbours, Russia and Poland. Cesar Cui (1835-1918), one
of Russia’s Mighty Handful, was born in Vilnius; among his teachers was the
Polish-born Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819-1872), who was organist at St John’s
Church in Vilnius and set to music poems by Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish poet
said to have inspired Chopin’s Ballades, whose Vilnius home is now marked by a
stone plaque.
Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911), after whom
the country’s elite arts high school is named, was both a composer and a
painter who pioneered abstract art in Lithuania; speaking of paintings, Marc
Chagall was born in nearby Vitebsk and his canvases evoke, in fantastical
images of floating violins and traditional Jewish fiddlers ‘on the roof’, the
musical aspect of the once vast, artistically fertile Jewish community of this
region. Vilnius was known in the 18th and 19th centuries
as ‘the Jerusalem of the North’. All that was destroyed (with local help)
during the Nazi invasion, and the traces of it flattened and suppressed under
the subsequent Soviet regime.
Interior of the Filharmonja
But today Lithuania’s musical life is flourishing. Its
ensembles include two symphony orchestras, the Lithuanian Opera and Ballet
Theatre with its own orchestra in Vilnius and the State Music Theatre in
Kaunas, two chamber orchestras in Vilnius and another in Kaunas, and a lively
choral and chamber music scene. Add to that the ambitious Vilnius Festival,
which has run every June for ten years, several annual festivals of
contemporary music and three high-level musical competitions, including a
violin competition named after Heifetz, and the importance of music becomes
clear as daylight. Folk music, particularly song and dance, is ever popular
(the local stringed instrument is the ‘kanklés’), and international jazz festivals
bring visitors flocking to Vilnius and Kaunas each year; also taking place is a
gradual resurgence of interest in Klezmer and the Jewish folk music of the
Vilna Ghetto.
Among today’s most celebrated Lithuanian-born soloists are
violinist Julian Rachlin and cellist David Geringas – the latter has
particularly championed the music of Anatolijus Senderovas, once a childhood
friend, now a leading Lithuanian composer, who has written a concerto and a
number of solo and chamber works for him. Lithuania has a strong
quartet-playing tradition; and although the Lithuanian String Quartet, for many
years the country’s leading chamber ensemble, has now disbanded, others are
doing well, notably the MK Ciurlionis Quartet and the Chordos Quartet which
places considerable emphasis on contemporary music.
The Gates of Dawn
This is currently in abundant supply. The director of the
Vilnius Festival, Gintautas Kevisas, also director of the Vilnius Opera and
Ballet Theatre, says that he wants composers ‘to feel that they are a very
significant part of the community’; he is eager to encourage this with an
annual Festival commission. The 2004 festival’s world premiere was the Duo
Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra by Vytautas Barkauskas, who won the
prestigious National Prize in 2003 for his Violin Concerto, Jeux. His Duo Concertante is dedicated
to the memory of an extraordinary figure in Lithuanian history: Chiune
Sugihara, Japanese vice-consul in Kaunas (then the capital) in 1940, who saved
6,000 Jewish refugees from the Nazis by issuing them with transit visas
although his government had forbidden him to do so. In tribute, much of the Duo
Concertante is modelled on Japanese music. Its premiere, with violinist
Philippe Graffin and violist Nobuko Imai as soloists, drew an enthusiastic
response; Imai has now arranged its Japanese premiere for the Tokyo Viola Space
Festival in May 2005.
This year, the Vilnius Festival commission is a new ballet
score from Senderovas. Senderovas, Barkauskas and numerous other Lithuanian
composers have been enjoying increasingly international profiles since
Lithuania declared independence from Russia in 1991. As Barkauskas says,
preparing for a previously unthinkable visit to Japan, ‘It’s like springtime!’
Lithuania is at an ‘interesting’ point in its history,
caught in a tug-of-war between Communist legacy and capitalist aspiration.
Experiences in some musical organisations are symptomatic of this ideological
transition: most notably, last year the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra ejected
its 77-year-old conductor, Saulis Sondeckis, who had been at its helm for 44
years, after a heated, vociferous and very public power struggle. During the
Communist years, such appointments were jobs for life. This – as every musician
I met in Vilnius agreed – has to change.
Nevertheless, most music in Lithuania is still state-run.
The National Philharmonic Society, the umbrella organisation under which
musical organisations were centralised under the Soviet regime, is still in
place and is generally regarded as a positive way to protect musical life,
preferable to exposing every organisation individually to the uncertainty of
market forces. Young talent is still nurtured by a network of state music
schools across the country, and also by the sizeable Ciurlionis School, which admits
the most talented pupils in music, ballet and fine art. When I visited Vilnius,
I found that most of the musicians and arts administrators I met had been
educated there.
Unsurprisingly, the dominant force in Lithuania’s string
teaching is the Russian school. At the 2004 Vilnius Festival, hearing the
Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra performing Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique
Symphony conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, and the young Lithuanian conductor
Robertas Servenikas leading the specially-formed Vilnius Festival Orchestra
through Mozart, Stamitz and Barkauskas, it was easy to imagine oneself sliding
back in time by 30 years. The LNSO’s style is intense and creamy, reminiscent
of recordings by the finest USSR orchestras, while the Festival Orchestra’s
approach was lively, spirited and clear, but without a trace of influence from
the sinewy sounds, inspired by period instrument performance, that now dominate
many European chamber orchestras.
The Heifetz Hall is in the Jewish Community Museum
The LNSO’s concertmaster, Almina Statkuviene, explains the
benefits of her colleagues’ unity of style: ‘Because we have all trained in the
same system – we are almost all graduates of the Lithuanian Music Academy – we
play together very naturally, with the same technique. Our principal conductor,
Juozas Domarkas, has been with the orchestra since 1964, but we have none of
the tensions that some other orchestras are currently experiencing! He studied
in St Petersburg with Ilya Musin and Mravinsky and has brought some excellent
traditions with him.’
Head of strings at the Lithuanian Academy of Music is
violist Petras Radzevicius: he is also principal viola of the LCO and has been
a crucial lynchpin in establishing the Jascha Heifetz Violin Competition. He
has taught at the LMA since 1963 and served as head of department since 1987.
Currently, he says, the string department holds 12 professors and around 80
students.
On Gediminas, looking towards the cathedral
‘After the war, in the early days of the Soviet occupation,
some young musicians from Moscow arrived in Vilnius,’ he explains, ‘and from
that time onwards the Russian school of playing, in those days considered
rather progressive, established itself here. All the professors in the string
department today are students of those original Russian teachers, and many of
them also went to Moscow for postgraduate studies with pupils of David
Oistrakh.’ A good handful of foreign students come to the Academy each year, he
adds: ‘Lithuania is known as a good place to study the Russian style.’
Nevertheless, some of Lithuania’s younger musicians,
especially those who have studied abroad, are impatient with the pace of
change. Mindaugas Backus, principal cello of the Lithuanian State Symphony
Orchestra and cellist of the Chordos Quartet, came to Britain to spend two
years at the Royal Northern College of Music; the contrast, he says, proved
revealing. He feels that musical attitudes in Lithuania need to be updated to
take in stylistic developments in the wider musical world as well as more
positive responses to personal enterprise. ‘The mentality in Lithuania remains
to a large extent very Eastern European and there is a lack of choice,’ he
explains. ‘Part of the problem is that so many young people leave the country;
I think they should come back and help to carry things forward to new
generations here!
‘Things are improving gradually,’ he adds. ‘People are
working hard and the atmosphere is hopeful. EU membership makes it easier for
us to travel and to invite people from abroad to give masterclasses and
perform, although resources are still scarce. And when you go overseas, it’s
very nice to stand in the EU Passports queue at immigration!’
Lithuania, poised on its cusp between old and new, looks set
to become a fertile ground for musical development in the 21st
century. It has long enjoyed that potential. And it may at last be on the road
to fulfilment and international recognition. JD
There was a lot of Shakespeare around yesterday - extravaganzas at the Globe, the Southbank, Stratford-upon-Avon live on TV (incidentally, if you were watching that you will have seen our fabulous novel-concert violinist partner, David Le Page, leading the Orchestra of the Swan behind all those great actors). I felt privileged to be able to make a small contribution to the celebrations, giving a pre-concert talk at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, where the young conductor Lahav Shani was at the helm for a programme of three different versions of Romeo and Juliet.
As a fun Long Read for Sunday, here's the text of my talk.
JD's Talk for the CBSO, 23 April 2016
Happy Shakespeare's Birthday! I think everyone has a Shakespeare concert tonight. There’s all manner of
readings and music in almost every venue I can think of. Everywhere we look,
people are celebrating his birthday and
marking the 400th anniversary of his death, and really, for an author who walked amongst
us so many centuries ago, this is simply amazing and wonderful.
And why not, when Shakespeare’s works are full to
bursting with music? It's not only in
the sound and flow of his language, which is full of the richness, the variety
and thecolour of music in its own
right. There are songs
in almost every play, serving many different
purposes –from Desdemona’s Willow Song in Othello,
which is a premonition of her own doom, to the high
spirits of It was a lover and his Lass in As You Like It and the pain of
unrequited love in Twelfth Night’s Come Away, Come Away Death. There are dances to
close, masques, balls and general fun to music in many of them. And there's music in the text, too:
Lorenzo and Jessica sit upon the moonlit grass to hear sweet music in The
Merchant of Venice and discuss how it moves them; Prospero’s Isle in The Tempest is
full of noises; and of course Orsino in Twelfth Night
starts the play with the line “If music be the food of love, play on”.
Shakespeare has inspired more composers than any other
single author, indeed probably more than anything extramusical except the
Bible: over 300 works, from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen right through to Thomas Ades’s opera The
Tempest. Let’s not forget how far Shakespeare travels in space as well as time. Ghosts of The Tempest haunt Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. In
Paris Berlioz was in thrall to Shakespeare; Mendelssohn was too, in Germany; and later Korngold in Vienna and Hollywood. Verdi in Italy wrote three magnificent Shakespearean operas, Macbeth, Otello
and Falstaff. And some of the greatest Shakespearean music comes from Russia
and is by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
The other day I was talking to a Russian conductor about the way Shakespeare has inspired composers. Growing up in Russia, he had got to know the plays in translation –notably from the fine
mid-20th-century versions by the poet Boris
Pasternak, the author of Dr Zhivago. Exploring the different translations
available, he had been interested to see the way every era coloured Shakespearein its own way. The 19th-century translations were, he
remarked, almost too beautiful. They played up the romanticism, smoothing out the earthy elements. He felt that it was only in the 20th-century that the translators really began to understand
the full scale and complexity and
variety in Shakespeare - the way the boundaries between what we
think of as his genres are blurred, for instance; the comedies are often
potentially tragedies that end well, and the tragedies offer plenty of comic
elements along the way.
So: Shakespeare in translation is filtered through a
mediator, and that mediator’s time and place, and what reaches the audience or the reader is therefore a personal vision, an interpretation. This sounds like something second-hand –yet if you think about it, that’s also how the
plays reach us in the theatre, through the interpretation of a director and
actors. The amazing thing about Shakespeare is that he can be reinvented time after time, and he’s so strong that he
always comes out on top.
If every translator filters Shakespeare through the style and preoccupations of his or her own day, so does every composer.
Translating Shakespeare into music is a huge challenge as well as an
inspiration, and every person will choose something different to respond to as
the creative cogs begin to whirr. Not only the time, place and personality of the composer are involved,
but also the purpose of that particular work.
Therefore what we have in tonight’s concert is incredibly varied, even though all three pieces are inspired by the
same story: Romeo and Juliet.
I'm sure you know
the story, but in case, let's recap quickly. The Montagus and the
Capulets, two distinguished families, are mortal enemies, though we never learn why (which is clever: Shakespeare doesn't let us take sides). They
kill each other in swordfights on the streets of Verona. Romeo is the Montagus' son. Juliet is the 14-year-old
daughter of the Capulets. Romeo and his friends Mercutio and Benvolio gatecrash
the Capulets’ball; there Romeo meets Juliet
and they fall in love. Later Romeo talks to her while she’s on her balcony and they
plan to go to Friar Lawrenceand get married in
secret. Friar Lawrence complies, hoping this will end
the traditional enmity. But immediately afterwards, Mercutio
and Juliet’s cousin Tybalt start fighting again. Romeo tries to stop them, but
Tybalt kills Mercutio, Mercutio blames Romeo for getting in the way and
proclaims "A plague on both your houses," as he dies. Romeo kills Tybalt. The
Duke of Verona banishes Romeo. He spends one night
with Juliet, then must leave. Friar Lawrence gives Juliet a potion that will make her appear dead. She will be
entombed in the family vault. He’ll summon Romeo, who’ll come back, she’ll wake up and they’ll run away together. But the message doesn’t reach Romeo –instead, he hears that Juliet is dead, and he goes to her tomb and takes poison. Juliet wakes to find him dead and stabs herself. Over their lifeless bodies, the families are reconciled
at last.
A portrait of Tchaikovsky (photo: Wikipedia)
It’s an eternal human story. It’s about crazy love and senseless hatred, about adolescence and the complexity of guiding young people, about friendship and loyalty, and nuances of
human emotion are explored on every single page. The theme of love goes through
it all –not only love between the star-crossed young
pair. Love of different types and degrees exists between the young friends,
between parents and children, between Juliet and her nurse,between Romeo and his teacher, Friar Lawrence, and even –especially in the ballet –between the implicitly youthful Lady Capulet and her nephew Tybalt.
We’re hearing three
versions tonight, by Tchaikovsky, Bernstein and Prokofiev, but there are absolutely heaps of others. Berlioz’s is part opera,
part incidental music, part oratorio. There’s an opera by Gounod –in which Juliette wakes up in time to sing a duet with Romeo before he
dies. The soundtrack of Zeffirelli's film of
the play is by Nino Rota and celebrated in its own right. There was even a fine
song by Dire Straits back in the 80s. And, less well known, the slow movement of
Beethoven’s first string quartet, Op.18 No.1, was
reputedly inspired by the tomb scene.
Each work from a different composer in a different era
transforms the play into something new and personal. Tchaikovsky, as a young
man in Moscow in 1869, produces a so-called Overture –though a tone-poem might be a
better description of it. Prokofiev, in soviet
Moscow in the
1930s and 40s, created a score specifically to
be danced, and found all manner of demands being placed on him to that end –of which more in a moment. And Leonard Bernstein in New
York in 1955, working with his dramatist Arthur Laurents, the lyricist Stephen
Sondheim and the choreographer Jerome Robbins, created in West Side Story
something more than a musical, a work for the people in which all the creative
team gave their very best work.
First, Tchaikovsky. It’s an early work, suggested to Tchaikovsky by the composer and frequent mentor to that generation of composers,
Balakirev. The premiere was a flop. Balakirev suggested changes, Tchaikovsky
more or less obeyed, and it was...still a flop. It wasn't until 1886 that a
final rethink by the now much more experienced composer provided it with its
title fantasy-overture and its splendid coda.
Tchaikovsky would have known the play from one of
those comparatively naïve, prettified translations. I think he must have identified deeply with
the notion of star-crossed love; it wasn’t easy to be gay in 19th-century
Russia and he suffered terrific internal struggles over this all his life. Perhaps an identification with the subject matter might
enhance the work's intensity, but actually I suspect that this work's runaway success in our times is 99 per cent down to sheer
hard graft. He finds in Romeo and Juliet’s story an almost classic Sonata form, with a
substantial introduction and that coda. The whole notion of
sonata form is conflict –and likewise with drama.
In the standard pattern of sonata form, two principal themes contrast with one
another, aided and abetted by a few others, and their potential is selectively explored in a central episode known as the Development. Tchaikovsky
creates these two themes in, first of all, pugnacious fighting music that
represents the enmity of the Montagues and the Capulets, and secondly the gorgeous melody that represents the lovers. The wealth of detail is amazing:
listen out for the irregular accents in the fighting music which could almost depict clashing swords, and in the love music the glimmers of harp which could
suggest the glint of moonlight. The development centres on the music of
conflict and rather than mingling it with the love theme, Tchaikovsky brings in
the other important musical idea: the one we hear at the very beginning; it feels as if it could have been modelled on the unaccompanied choirs
of the Russian orthodox church.
This theme
represents Friar Lawrence and his attempts to calm the conflict by bringing Romeo
and Juliet together. It provides the introduction, the coda and some of the middle too, sounding strongly through the fighting in the development, as if reminding us of the context in which Romeo kills Tybalt. The coda begins
with a funeral march and as the work comes to its close the chorale, smoothing
things, extrapolating good from tragedy, gives way to the love theme turned
more or less upside down and the final chords are from the fight theme, in
reconciliation. In short, Tchaikovsky takes the very essence of the
story, turns it into pure musical
structure and
imbues it with his own time and place firstly with his intense romanticsm and also by bringing in the Russian orthodox flavour,
which you wouldn’t have found in 15th-century Verona or Stratford upon Avon.
Nor would you have found much of it in Stalin’s Russia. In
1935, Prokofiev was living safely abroad. Stalin, it seems, was eager to lure
him back to Moscow, and Prokofiev was not so difficult to lure.
He liked the idea of writing accessible, enjoyable music that could be
appreciated by a wide audience, he felt out of step with the avant-garde
contemporary music of Europe, notably
serialism, and the rise of the Nazis was doing nothing
to encourage him to stay in the west. Offered the
tempting bait of creating a ballet of Romeo and Juliet for the great Bolshoi, he took it. He returned to
live in Russia and began work on a scenario with the dramatist Sergei Radlov. They
reformatted the story on quasi-revolutionary lines, concentrating on the
struggle between generations more than the family rivalry. Quite incredibly,
they planned a happy ending! Prokofiev even wrote it. It was unearthed and performed about eight years ago and apparently it contained a lot of C major chords.
But in 1936 everything
changed: Stalin’s purges were
reaching their height, and the chairman of the newly created Committee on Arts Affairs, which
enforced Soviet ideology, dissolved the entire administration of the Bolshoi. Romeo and Juliet was postponed, then shelved. Next, it was agreed that it
would be performed at the Kirovin St Petersburg in 1940. Then: more trouble. The choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky wanted more dances in order to show off his company and Prokofiev was forced
to rewrite and rejig swathes of it, creating
plenty of short showpiece numbers, making the orchestration denser to sound more ‘socialist realist’and restoring the original tragic ending, apparently on Stalin’s demand. Which is
perhaps surprising coming from Stalin. It was finally performed at the Bolshoi
in 1946, with the specific aim of sending Churchill a signal about Russia’s cultural involvement with Britain and its Immortal
Bard. Ironic that such a masterpiece as this is actually not what Prokofiev
had envisioned at all.
But that is our
gain, because Prokofiev, creating an entire ballet, could explore the aspects
Tchaikovsky's short piece could not: there are bustling street scenes,
full of life and humour; there’s Juliet’s nurse, with whom Romeo and his friends flirt fabulously; there are masses of dances, dances at the ball, dances for the townsfolk, dances for Juliet’s friends.
Prokofiev might not have wanted to create them, butthey’re wonderful and really true to Shakespeare’s spirit, adding verve, humour, life-force, and character too. There’s a particularly
delightful moment which if you see the choreographer Kenneth Macmillan’s version with
the Royal ballet, he gives to Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio, in which they disguise themselves with much glee
before going in to the ball. You feel their youth, their energy, their earthy
humour and Romeo’s premonition that something extraordinary is about to happen.
The
balcony scene is heavenly –of course, this being a
ballet, Juliet doesn’t stay on her balcony very long, coming down to dance a pas de deux with Romeo instead. But Prokofiev, for all his glorious
melodies, never slips towards the sentimental –even at its most
tender there’s a dark undertone to this music and his personal harmonic language gives it a subtle, unstable and slightly astringent soundworld,
typical of Prokofiev.
We have Balakirev to thank for Tchaikovsky's score, and a choreographer to thank for Prokofiev's. And we have
another choreographer to thank for conceiving the idea that became West Side Story. It was Jerome Robbins, who suggested to
Leonard Bernstein writing a musical based on Romeo and Juliet. Originally it was going to be East
Side Story and the warring families were to have been respectively Catholic and Jewish. First mooted in 1949, it didn’t get off the ground. But
the creative team –Bernstein, Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim –reconvened in 1955 to try again, discussing what was then called
juvenile delinquency. They explored the idea of the gang replacing the family –young people joining violent gangs as a way of belonging to something –a scenario that's still very much with us
now.
The scene moved to the Upper West Side, and the gangs became self-styled Americans on the one hand –the Jets, in which our hero Tony has been mixed up –versus the Puerto Rican immigrants of the Sharks, led by Bernardo, whose sister is our heroine, Maria. Of course, the twist is that the Americans who are
warring against the immigrant Puerto Ricans are themselves the children of
immigrants.
The creative team ditched the less
plausible elements of Shakespeare, like the sleeping potion –and Maria does not die. Instead she delivers a powerful speech over Tony’s body; she takes
a gun and declares that she, too, can kill now because she has learned
how to hate. It’s a devastating moment, because it demonstrates so clearly how these
cycles of violence are self-perpetuating.
Here’s a wonderful description by Laurents of the creative team's aims: “We all knew what we did not want. Neither formal poetry nor flat
reportage; neither opera nor split-level musical comedy numbers; neither
zippered-in ballets nor characterless dance routines. We didn't want newsreel
acting, blue-jean costumes or garbage can scenery any more than we wanted
soapbox pounding for our theme of young love destroyed by a violent world of
prejudice. What we did want was to aim at a lyrically and theatrically
sharpened illusion of reality…”
Musically, the scenario provided Bernstein
with some choice material. The Puerto Rican aspect meant he could get
his teeth into Latin American music in a big way –its rhythms
permeate the song ‘America’and the dance scene at
the Gym, which we hear as the Symphonic Dances, with the famous Mambo. The Jets
are represented at first by jazzy rhythms, finger-clicking, a cat-like prowling
in the shadows. And the songs range from the anthem Somewhere to a brilliant
bit of satirical comedy in Gee, Officer Krupky, when the Jets joke about
telling the policeman that they’re good underneath and it’s their circumstances that have made them delinquents –one of them says “I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!” Set bang on in its
creators' own era and city, its verve, poetry, earthiness, raw passion and
violence is actually incredibly true to the spirit of Shakespeare's original.
It’s fascinating to see that now West Side Story
is undergoing a metamorphosis. It's starting to cross in
earnest from the Broadway theatre to the opera house. I’m off to Salzburg
in a few weeks’time to see Cecilia Bartoli as Maria. AndI think it’s going to be done at
Glyndebourne. I think that's great. This top quality work
deserves that top quality treatment.
One last thought. I think the question of filters –such as a translator’s Shakespeare, a composer’s Shakespeare, teamwork Shakespeare –is pertinent in many areas. What we see in the media, from Facebook to the national news, is always someone’s interpretation. We have
to remember that what we take as information from other people is rarely pure fact. There’s a filter of time, place and perspective on almost everything. Take that home and have a think. And enjoy theconcert. Thank you very much.
