ROMEO & JULIET FOR ORCHESTRA & ACTORS
Ray Leslee
About this work:
Commissioned and premiered by The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, July 2000. Last performed June 2003 by the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jung-Ho Pak, as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas
(New Haven CT).
The Buffalo News review by Herman Trotter was reprinted in The American Record Guide, 2001 (see below).
Buffalo Philharmonic: Leslee, Romeo & Juliet For
Orchestra & Actors [premiere].
Author/s: Herman Trotter
American Record Guide, Issue: Jan, 2001
REVIEW
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. Th is seemed a
significant enough premiere to warrant more than the single
performance scheduled by the orchestra.
Year composed: 2000
Duration: 00:00:00
Ensemble type: Orchestra:Orchestra with Soloist(s)
Instrumentation: 1 Piccolo, 1 Flute, 1 Oboe, 1 English Horn, 1 Clarinet, 1 Bass Clarinet, 2 Bassoon, 2 Horn in F, 2 Trumpet, 3 Trombone, 1 Tuba, 1 Timpani, 2 Percussion (General), 1 Strings (General), 1 Harp, ,3 Narrator soloist(s)
Instrumentation notes: 1st and 2nd Movements (of 4)