Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet

[richardfinegold]

I recently got a download of the 1963 Monteux/LSO performance live in Vienna - the 88 year old and his players are on great form. Two years earlier he had signed a 25-year contract! He died in 1964.

(It's on YouTube)

I believe the rest of that concert was the Fifth Symphony and the First PC with John Ogden? I have DVD-A of the entire concert that I shall dig out today as well. The Monteux/Boston Fifth has long been my favorite ( so many conductors make it sound hackneyed, but Monteux makes it fresh and vital), but the Vienna was a very similar offering with great sonics. And the R&J was also quite good.
My first R&J was Ormandy/Philly. I have the Ormandy/ Sony Tchaikovsky box in front of me now, as I am playing the Nutcracker Suite from it at the wife’s request. I played the R&J to death as a teenager and now it feels over familiar. I wonder how I would feel about the Ormandy R&J now, as the Nutcracker, which was also my first recording of that work, is striking me as slick and superficial, albeit voluptuously played

[seabright]

All very interesting but which versions of the work are we dealing with. There are recordings of the 1869, 1870(BBCSSO, Baldur Bronnimann, broadcast during the Radio 3 Tchaikovsky Experience), and 1880 final definitive version.

Needless to say, these versions are on YouTube. Geoffrey Simon and the LSO made the first recording of the 1869 version for Chandos in 1981 but here's a more recent performance from Moscow, Vladimir Jurowski conducting. Note that this doesn't have the ending we are used to ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybgV6kcWWjE

The second version, the first to be published, is what we know from the final 1880 version, apart from the last five minutes which have a different ending to both the 1869 and 1880 versions. The whole BBC / Bronnimann broadcast doesn't seem to have been uploaded onto YouTube but we do get those last five minutes in his performance ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9dZ7SsBiv4

There is another ending too! ... In her 1906 translation of Modeste Tchaikovsky's "Life and Letters," Rosa Newmarch reveals that Balakirev had complained about the ending of the 1870 edition: "Why those accentuated chords in the very last bars? This seems to contradict the meaning of the play and is inartistic. Madame Rimsky-Korsakov has scratched out those chords and wants to make the pianoforte arrangement end pianissimo. I do not know whether you will consent to this alteration." In fact, Modeste supplied a footnote which states: "In his final arrangement, Tchaikovsky omitted those chords himself." However, by then the 1880 version had been printed, so if Tchaikovsky did provide a quiet ending, it would only have been on a single sheet of manuscript paper which doesn't seem to have survived.

Interestingly, Stokowski had clearly read Rosa Newmarch's book and in the absence of a published "pianissimo" ending, supplied one himself! ... He recorded "Romeo and Juliet" several times, all with his "quiet ending," but the only one on YouTube comes from a set of 1944 78s with the New York City Symphony Orchestra. It's a terrific performance but suffers somewhat from the ancient sound. Still, you do get an ending with none of the "inartistic" loud chords of which Balakirev had bitterly complained ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbA9AlKpDcM

So there we have it: four different editions of Tchaikovsky's most popular "fantasy overture"!