Muti, Chicago Symphony - Prokofiev: Suite From Romeo And Juliet (2014)

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Muti, Chicago Symphony - Prokofiev: Suite From Romeo And Juliet (2014)

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In the summer of 1917, Chicago businessman Cyrus McCormick, Jr., the farm machine magnate, met ̀the 26-year-old composer Sergei Prokofiev while on a business trip to Russia. Prokofiev was unknown to McCormick, but the composer recognised the distinguished American’s name at once, because the estate his father had managed owned several impressive International Harvester machines. McCormick expressed an interest in the composer’s new music, and he eventually agreed to pay for the printing of his unpublished 'Scythian Suite'. He also encouraged Prokofiev to come to the United States, and asked him to send some of his scores to Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Frederick Stock. Prokofiev made his debut with the Chicago Symphony the following season, playing his First Piano Concerto and conducting the orchestra in his Scythian Suite in December 1918, both U.S. premieres and returned to Chicago four more times. During the last trip to Chicago, in January 1937, he led the Chicago Symphony in selections from his new, still-unstaged ballet, 'Romeo and Juliet'. The premiere of' Romeo and Juliet' eventually was given in Brno, Czechoslovakia, without Prokofiev’s participation and the ballet wasn’t staged in Russia until January 1940 after both Kirov and Bolshoi ballets had turned it down. In the meantime, Prokofiev made two orchestral suites of seven excerpts each, and it was the first of these that he conducted in Chicago. This new album features selections from both of Prokofiev’s suites, played with thrilling intensity by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Riccardo Muti.

Having performed the suite in Chicago and on tour in 2011, the CSO and Maestro Muti returned to the work in the 2013/14 season and recorded it at Symphony Centre during live concerts in October 2013. Includes full-colour booklet with notes in English, French and German.

Composer: Sergei Prokofiev
Conductor: Riccardo Muti
Orchestra/Ensemble: Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Reviews: This recording of selections from the two Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet orchestral suites, drawn from concerts given in Chicago last year, reveals Muti in full command of the Prokofiev idiom and of the music’s narrative perspective.
His way of phrasing and subtly manipulating the music’s ebb and flow – both in terms of rhythmic pacing and as regards the shading of dynamics – gives these well-known numbers a renewed dramatic impulse. The scenes spring vividly to life. The opening has a manly, striding menace; the romantic music for the two lovers floats ethereally and tenderly; the “Death of Tybalt” strikes its fatal blows with brutal finality.
The orchestra, with which Prokofiev was frequently associated, plays with a radiant spectrum of colour and with a refined balance of timbres and textures while understanding the sonorities that make Prokofiev’s orchestration at once so individual and so recognisable. This is an interpretation of outstanding presence.