Excerpts from Romeo and Juliet (1936)

arranged for viola and piano by Vadim Borisovsky

Introduction

The Young Juliet

Dance of the Knights

Romeo and Juliet at Friar Lawrence's

Carnival

Mercutio

Death of Mercutio

Death of Juliet

Prokofiev himself arranged no fewer than four suites from his Romeo and Juliet ballet music but none, unfortunately, for a solo string instrument. Vadim Borisovsky has to some extent compensated for that omission by making arrangement of, in all, 13 scenes or dances for viola and piano – seven of them in 1961 and five more in 1977. Lawrence Power has chosen to present eight of Borisovsky’s arrangements in much the same order as the the orchestral originals appear in the ballet. Unlike any of Prokofiev’s suites, the sequence begins where the ballet begins, with the Introduction to the first act. Instead of setting the scene in Shakespeare’s Renaissance Verona as one might expect, the Introduction floats straight into the erotic action on a lyrical fragment of melody associated with the most passionate episode in the ballet, Farewell before Parting in Act III. The rest of the Introduction is a character study of Juliet, including the delightfully innocent theme to be definitively introduced in The Young Juliet in Act I and a more sensuous one from Juliet’s Variation in the same scene.

The Young Juliet, introduced by a game of runs and leaps, features the innocent theme already heard in the Introduction and, as Juliet expresses her reluctance to accept the hand of Paris, a slower middle section with a poignant melody which is to reappear in tragic circumstances in the last movement. The Dance of the Knights is presented in a particularly masterly arrangement, which draws on both the resonant sonority of    the viola’s lower register to reflect the dancing of the rough-shod knights and the ethereal quality of its harmonics as the unhappy Juliet is glimpsed dancing with Paris. Romeo and Juliet at Friar Lawrence's, which comes from the second act of the ballet, begins as a portrait of the serious-minded Friar Lawrence but also evokes the personalities of the two lovers as they persuade him to marry them in secret.

The lively Carnival, a brilliantly scored version of the Dance of the Five Couples in the second act, is a diversion from the unfolding of the dramatic events that are to follow. So too is Mercutio, a virtuoso acrobatic exercise for Mercutio’s “dancing shoes with nimble soles”. But the macabre Death of Mercutio, devastatingly coloured in Borisovsky’s version, marks the event which sets in motion the inevitable progression towards the tragic ending. In the Epilogue to the ballet, the Death of Juliet, the young heroine awakens from her death-like sleep in the family tomb to the saddest of the group of melodies associated with her and, as it develops, finds Romeo dead beside her. She recalls their ecstatic Love Dance, though now only a ghostly echo of it, before embracing Romeo and, according to the stage directions, “dying slowly”.