![]() ![]() All of this is put to the service of a retelling of the story in which each section is carefully crafted for highest dramatic effect. ![]() It is a score of immense variety and difficulty, with choral writing in 16 parts and an orchestral fabric of beautiful colors and textures. Roméo, which has rarely been done complete in South Florida, is in seven movements: An introduction, Capulet’s House (Romeo Alone), Balcony Scene, Queen Mab Scherzo, Funeral Cortège (for Juliet), Tomb Scene, and Finale. “That, to me, is the miracle of Berlioz.” Guillermo Figueroa. ![]() “But the qualities of the French music of Berlioz are so particular that’s why I think it was ingenious that he was able to take a conceptual idea of form and style and develop it with his own completely unique language,” he said. That just informs the way we think,” he said, likening the piece to an “extended Beethoven symphony.” Beethoven grew out of Mozart and Haydn, and so on. “It’s a matter of acknowledging the link that makes everything possible. Unusual though its form may be, Berlioz took his inspiration not just from Shakespeare but Beethoven, specifically the Ninth Symphony, which was a relatively new piece (it premiered in 1824) at the time Berlioz was composing Roméo.īut that doesn’t mean it will be performed like an hommage to Beethoven. It’s a 95-minute choral symphony that charts the entire narrative arc of the star-crossed lovers of old Verona. (He was just one of many young French artists for whom Smithson was the romantic idol of the day.)įor Roméo, he created one of his innovative, hard-to-describe forms, a work that fits into no previous category. Berlioz, indeed, fell in love with his wife, an Irish actress named Harriet Smithson, when he saw her as Juliet in an 1827 performance of the play at the Odéon Theater, even though he spoke no English. Roméo et Juliette is based, of course, on the play by Shakespeare, a writer who was all the rage in early 19th-century Paris. “I sat transfixed, struggling to play the notes while fighting back tears of profound emotion … From that moment on, life was never the same, as I had found music that spoke to me as nothing ever before, a composer that I had previously not understood and who had now become my artistic goal, and the central passion of my musical life.” “After a couple of days of rehearsals, the musical mist gradually cleared, and I will never forget the moment when, finally, at the concert, on the stage of Carnegie Hall, the full impact of the music hit me and Berlioz’s intentions became clear to me,” Figueroa wrote in 2003 for an essay he penned for Berlioz’s bicentenary. But to get them to understand it, that’s my goal,” he said.įigueroa, who will lead performances Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, has had a long love affair with the music of Berlioz, ever since first encountering the composer while a student at Juilliard in the 1970s, playing violin in an orchestra taking part in Les Troyens, the French composer’s gigantic Virgil-based opera. The technical difficulties, they will master. He’s not as concerned that his musicians will be able to physically play the music. But it can easily go over people’s heads.” Once you get it, then every single note is unbelievable. “It’s not something that they’re used to. “The difficulty is going to be in understanding it, in getting it, particularly in something like the ‘Adagio,’” Figueroa said. It’s an exciting and rare event, but it also poses a serious challenge to the young conservatory orchestral players who are tackling it, and not just for technique. The score he’s pointing to, explaining the perils of this or that passage, is the playbook for this weekend, when the violinist and conductor will lead the Lynn Philharmonia, the Master Chorale of South Florida, and two solo singers in Roméo et Juliette, a “dramatic symphony” by Hector Berlioz that premiered in 1839. Sitting at a table in a new Boca Raton diner, Guillermo Figueroa opens his cloth-bound, dark blue Bärenreiter edition of the music and points to a page, marked with various colored pencils. ![]()
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