Romeo and Juliet Suite, op. 64

Prokofiev extracted two orchestral suites from Romeo and Juliet in 1936, opus 64 bis and 64 ter, two years before the ballet itself reached the stage; a third followed in 1946 as opus 101. The suites were heard first, in Moscow and Leningrad, and they carried the music into concert halls while the theatres were still refusing it. Prokofiev did not follow the plot order in assembling them, and conductors have taken that licence further, mixing numbers from all three suites into sequences of their own.

The score behind the suites had a difficult history. Prokofiev wrote it in 1935 with the director Sergei Radlov and the dramatist Adrian Piotrovsky, in a scenario that ended happily; after the Pravda attacks on Shostakovich in 1936 the authors restored Shakespeare’s tragic ending. The ballet was first staged in Brno in December 1938, without the composer present, and reached the Soviet stage in January 1940 in Leonid Lavrovsky’s version, which altered the score over Prokofiev’s objections; the original 1935 score was not heard until 2008, at the Bard Music Festival.