Prokofiev described his Piano Concerto as a work that “the audience barely understood, but they supported it all the same.” Indeed the work has become the most popular of his piano concertos, perhaps in part because he weaves Russian folk tunes into the music, elaborating on them with speed and virtuosity. Composed in 1935, Romeo and Juliet was Prokofiev's first great ballet of the Soviet period. Performed here as a suite for orchestra, attention is particularly drawn to the work’s exceptional thematic richness. Despite its fundamentally classical style, the work shows certain harmonic violence that foreshadows his later modernist and expressionist works.

© Yannick Perrin