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Two volcanic forces erupt into the story: the mindless violence of the young blades and the mindless passion of the young lovers. Grist to music's mill - any half decent composer can cook up that sort of stuff. What does a genius like Prokofiev add to the mix? One answer, of two or three, is chiaroscuro (there's a nice anoraky word for you) - fleeting half stated feelings, ambiguities, barely noticeable twists in the harmony, the evolution and transformation of the great melodies. If you journey through the complete ballet, you'll soon discover how these sketchy details gradually join the dots up to reveal a wide human landscape, just as in the great Russian novels. Take the dawn parting scene (you know, Romeo and Juliet's first dawn together......) the music is miraculously loaded with suggestion and innuendo. It's from Shakespeare's Act 3, scene V - why don't you read it? Every line is saturated with bitter sweet feelings, contradictions, life and death ambiguities, fateful hesitation; and all this is spiked by the irony that we, the audience, know what is going to happen. I don't know if Prokofiev set out to orchestrate this kind of detail - his process was instinctive and serendipitous, always relishing characterisation for it's own sake; the music and the ballet had its own strange evolution, only eventually ending up as one of the greatest masterpieces. Overburdened emotion, pangs of doubt, desolation - every nuance is there in this scene alone - and, at the end, almost inaudible very high repeated notes augur the impending disaster. "It is the lark that sings so out of tune, Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps".......or did he merely intend to evoke the soothing nightingale that "sings on yond pomegranate tree"....?

Different composers will have their own take; different composing processes bend different bits of the original - see how Tchaikovsky and Berlioz respond to the Friar Lawrence character. You'll be forgiven for not knowing the earlier versions of the über famous Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet overture, but the Friar becomes more important through the versions - and he intended still yet another revision. Berlioz gives the Friar a very long last word - a massive sermon, far outweighing his role in the original. Both composers had their own reasons to feel outcast, estranged and at war with their communities - how they must have longed for the loving acceptance and peace mongering of Shakespeare's wonderful Friar. Shakespeare grew up in a world of Christian religious bigotry, where a careless comment could quickly send you to a gruesome death - how even more miraculous was it that he managed to lay open the arteries of our lives, to challenge the most sacred tenets, and escape to live another day? Somehow, he became the master of 'not saying', the master of dilemma and ambiguity. Would he have become such a good tight rope walker if he hadn't been forced to tight rope walk? Returning to Russia, Prokofiev found himself tottering along a wobbly tight rope - an even worse world of ambiguity and double play, where every day was loaded with mortal danger and the threat of arbitrary annihilation. Did Stalin's gruesome world become a stimulant for Prokofiev's muse? By the way......guess who gets the music for the Friar? The cellists......of course!

Composers arrange suites to get their stuff played, to try to make a living.....so they can feed their children and buy time to write masterpieces. What gets lost in this process? Prokofiev made three suites, each with a selection of good bits, which are presented out of context and in virtually random order. Most performances pick n' mix from the first two suites. Any selection is inevitably going to miss out a best bit, and, most importantly, is going to miss out the underlining inexorable story line - the chassis of this juggernaut. Hearing one of the suites, are we expected to gain some vicarious excitation, because the real thing is not on offer that evening? Does the mere existence of these suites actually divert the audience away from the full experience? Prokofiev's arrogantly strutting Montague and Capulet theme is universally familiar - even if it's been traduced as the sound track of The Apprentice (as our home page reminded you). Bernstein's equivalent is in the finger clicking of the gang members (Jets and Sharks), a gesture (no text, no music) that chillingly expresses disdain and latent violence. In his suite, we players do that finger clicking - and it usually raises a giggle from the audience!? Is it only by knowing the original that you can re-live the power of that finger click? If you aren't familiar with the complete music or don't know the story, would you be sensitive to all of this? I wonder. As players, we are privileged: our job is to work this music, detail by detail, from the inside out, to bring it to life with our bodies - not our minds. More: our working lives are spent crawling around inside some of the greatest creative minds of history. How can a mere selection of this calibre of music do justice? In our concert, the Prokofiev selection occupied the whole second half - that's the 'big symphony' slot. And yet we didn't play the great love duet or the grave scene - both of them powerfully overwhelming statements (hardly peripheral to the story). We ended with the death of Tybalt. Here, the great howling phrase that follows the awful stabbing usually gets me choking back tears.....and I don't consider myself a softie. Just a few laconic phrases and stage directions from Shakespeare, but paraphrased by Prokofiev so that they leave us gawping at the appalling ambiguity: Romeo has his glorious moment of revenge, egged on by us in our shared hatred for Tybalt, and in that revenge he kicks open the gates of his own hell....we egged him on to destroy himself and Juliet - as always in life, we didn't intervene, we didn't try to stop the madness. What voltage of anger is in those fifteen fearsomely repetitive orchestral sword stabs - fifteen violent stabs right into his body? Could words express it, could dancers express it? Are we expected to let it connect with our own inner rage? To be honest, I even feel a bit 'awkward' just being asked to do that bit in public.....maybe, in a padded cell.......? What do you think of all this if you are not 'in' to what is going on......"that was a noisy bit, wasn't it dear"? The audience fidgets - embarrassed, as would the players if they didn't have something practical to do with their hands.

I'm not saying don't play the suites. Some is better than none. Is it the difference between Readers Digest and the full Dostoevsky? Or is it?