Performance by the London Symphony Orchestra

28 February 2016
Barbican Hall, London

Review by Lorena Brosset, Undergraduate Law

Gianandrea Noseda superbly executed Berlioz’ symphony, Romeo and Juliet.

If Berlioz composed the symphony to describe the feelings the play inspired him rather than the story itself, he still created a work displaying the originality and variety of Romeo and Juliet. As Berlioz put it, Shakespeare’s theatre piece was for him “a sublime thunderclap, illuminating the most distant depths”. He largely succeeded in transferring these emotions into the symphony. To the violent fugato depicting the fight between the Capulets and the Montagues to the dissonant fortissimo as Juliet stabs herself at the end, the score expresses the violence and the bittersweet love which are at the centre of Shakespeare’s play.

The fifth and seventh movements were not included in the performance. Although the finale movement can seem a bit anticlimactic and redundant after the despair conveyed by the precedent movement, where Romeo discovers Juliet’s lifeless body, keeping the fifth movement would have permitted to make the transition less abrupt between the fourth and the sixth ones.

The fourth movement, which is the most technically difficult to perform in Berlioz’s whole repertoire, was impressively conducted. The rapid interchange of strings and woodwind and the off-balance rhythms makes it especially hard to interpret, but the LSO played this part flawlessly, rendering the lyrical and exultant music exactly as Berlioz composed it.

The performance was a moving rendition of five of the movements of Romeo and Juliet, so well-executed that I wish I could have had listened to the entirety of Berlioz’s dramatic symphony.