When the Orchestra Fell in Love: The Symphonic Experience at Tilles Center
There are concerts one merely attends, and then there are concerts one steps into, as into an illuminated room where something irreversible is about to happen. Today, Shakespeare, Prokofiev, Bernstein, and Tchaikovsky met on one stage — and, for a single luminous afternoon, four hundred years of desire spoke with a single voice.
At the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of Long Island University, the Massapequa Philharmonic offered the second, rarer kind of concert: Romeo & Juliet: The Symphonic Experience, a tour of Shakespeare, Prokofiev, Bernstein, and Tchaikovsky that declined to sit politely within its frame. Conceived and designed by Maestro David Bernard, with the dramatic portions curated and directed by Dr. Valerie Clayman Pye, the program created a single throughline across story, score, and dance. Rather than simply performing the tale, it convened it — gathering three composers, a company of actors, and the dancers of the Eglevsky Ballet to answer, each in turn, the same ancient and unanswerable question about two children of Verona.
David Bernard and the Massapequa Philharmonic present Romeo & Juliet: The Symphonic Experience with the Eglevsky Ballet at Tilles Center for the Performing Arts. Photo by Joe Connor
David Bernard and the Massapequa Philharmonic: A Conductor Who Trusts the Drama
To begin with, consider the sheer nerve of the design. Bernard, guiding this orchestra through its fortieth-anniversary year, is the kind of musician who believes, as the evening's own notes insist, that the tale "matters more than the world that ended it." Consequently, he did not treat the podium as a pulpit; he treated it as a hinge. The Shakespearean text, spoken first, set each scene — the feud, the girl before she knows what is coming, the ball, the parting — and only then did the music answer. Moreover, this ordering made the throughline unmistakable, turning an afternoon of famous excerpts into one continuous argument. Indeed, watching the players draw magnificence, subtlety, and meaning from these scores with such aplomb, one perceived the truth the program states outright: that "what happened between these two people matters more" than any verdict later pronounced upon it.
Brett Dalis as Romeo in a scene from Romeo & Juliet: The Symphonic Experience, by the Massapequa Philharmonic with Conductor David Bernard and the Eglevsky Ballet at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts. Photo by Joe Connor
Four Hundred Years in the Making: The Long Lineage Behind One Love Story
Part of the afternoon's richness, furthermore, came from the way it knowingly wore its own history. As Bernard's erudite notes remind us, Shakespeare did not invent these lovers; the tale had already migrated for centuries — an oral story in Renaissance Italy, a novella by da Porto, an English poem by Brooke — "each writer in a different country and form, passing the lovers forward by hand." That restlessness, the notes observe, "proved prophetic," for the same pattern later moved from page to opera house to canvas to Broadway. Indeed, one delights in the recollection that a young Hector Berlioz, watching Garrick's version in Paris in 1827, was so undone by the actress playing Juliet that he married her — an anecdote that lends the whole enterprise a human, almost gossipy warmth. To stage all of this at once, then, is not antiquarian pedantry but living homage: it keeps the story's long line in view and lets its family tree support the afternoon.
Santina Leone as Juliet and Brett Dalis as Romeo in a scene from Romeo & Juliet: The Symphonic Experience, by the Massapequa Philharmonic with Conductor David Bernard and the Eglevsky Ballet at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts. Photo by Joe Connor
Three Composers, One Immortal Love: Prokofiev, Bernstein, and Tchaikovsky
The evening opened, appropriately, in shadow. Prokofiev's Montagues and Capulets arrived as a slow, crushing processional — heavily oppressive chords, brass leading, gravid with a premonition of death — stamping out what the notes memorably call "the rhythm of institutional hatred" before either lover is born. Here, already, was chiaroscuro made audible. Then appeared the young Juliet's quicksilver woodwinds and orchestral bells, a girl "barely into her teens who has not yet any idea what is coming," rendered with crystalline purity by the strings.
Meanwhile, threaded throughout, Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story supplied the century's most electric answer to the same masked ball; the Mambo detonated with febrile, coruscating ferocity, the Jets and Sharks battling through dance "before either has drawn a weapon." Above all, the curation made the throughline legible: Prokofiev's Soviet-era ballet and Bernstein's tenement fire-escape met the same tragic pulse, with the poignant tritone that medieval theorists called diabolus in musica recurring as a shared, sinister thread.
Santina Leone as Juliet, in a scene from Romeo & Juliet: The Symphonic Experience, by the Massapequa Philharmonic with Conductor David Bernard and the Eglevsky Ballet at Tilles Center for the Performing Arts. Photo by Joe Connor
The Soloists Who Made the Night Ache: Voices, Actors, and Dancers
No such alchemy succeeds without artists willing to be vulnerable, and here the soloists were peerless. Soprano Sarah Ellis, as Maria, distilled the vertiginous instant of first sight into a single rising phrase built — like the Prologue itself — upon that same "devil's interval," now resolved upward into pure, helpless infatuation. Opposite her, tenor Marek Zurowski, as Tony, sang Maria and Tonight with a soulful cantilena that appeared to lift the balcony clean off its hinges; together, in One Hand, One Heart, these two artists offered the score's quietest, most hymn-like vow, a moment of near-unbearable tenderness. Nor were the spoken and danced lovers any less affecting. The actors Kaira Gula and Brody Hampson gave us Shakespeare's shared sonnet — two strangers finishing each other's sentences, falling into a structure neither fully controls — while Santina Leone and Brett Dalis, under the choreography of Eglevsky's Peter LeBreton Merz, translated Prokofiev's balcony music into rising string lines made visible in motion. Threading it all — Chorus, Nurse, Friar Lawrence, and at last the Prince — the versatile Beth Goddin kept the story aligned from voice to movement, and spoke the frame closed with the play's saturnine benediction, "All are punished."
Sarah Ellis as Maria, and Marek Zurowski as Tony (from West Side Story), in a scene from Romeo & Juliet: The Symphonic Experience, by the Massapequa Philharmonic with Conductor David Bernard and the Eglevsky Ballet at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts. Photo by Joe Connor
The Fantasy Overture Finale: Tchaikovsky's Voice for a Speechless Grief
Yet the apotheosis was still to come. For the finale, Bernard chose the apposite Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture — the whole story told once more, this time entirely without words. By then, the tale had already been recounted in three languages; so, when the English horn and muted violas floated that great love theme — a theme the Los Angeles Philharmonic's own annotators rank among the most recognizable in all of music — the effect was of memory rather than narration. In truth, this is the deepest wisdom the concert had to offer, and it reaches back to the Romantic conviction, dear to Schopenhauer and his heirs, that music alone can probe states of feeling that action and speech leave untouched. Tchaikovsky's crashing B-minor conflict and his D-flat love theme, "as remote from the conflict as love is from hatred," collided one final time; then only the funerary calm of the closing bars remained. As Bernard's notes put it with disarming simplicity, "Shakespeare gave the story its words. Tchaikovsky gave it its voice."
Beth Goddin as the Chorus, Friar Lawrence, Nurse, and Prince Escalus, in a scene from Romeo & Juliet: The Symphonic Experience, by the Massapequa Philharmonic with Conductor David Bernard and the Eglevsky Ballet at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts. Photo by Joe Connor
Why the Massapequa Philharmonic Belongs on Your Calendar
This persisted, finally, not as spectacle but as sentiment — the frisson of recognizing one's own halcyon memories of first love in music written a century and an ocean apart. For that reason, this was more than a concert; it was an argument, made in sound and motion, that these two young people matter. Undeniably, the Massapequa Philharmonic — in partnership with the Eglevsky Ballet and the Post Theatre Company — has become one of Long Island's most inventive cultural engines. The throughline remained clear from first scene to final hush, and consequently, if you missed this one, do not miss the next. Seek out the season; let yourself be reduced, gloriously, to tears.
Conductor and Director David Bernard describes the next scene from Romeo & Juliet: The Symphonic Experience, by the Massapequa Philharmonic with the Eglevsky Ballet at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts. Photo by Joe Connor
Romeo & Juliet: The Symphonic Experience
PRESENTED BY
Massapequa Philharmonic & Eglevsky Ballet David Bernard, Music Director and Conductor Conceived and Designed by David Bernard
Dramatic Portions Curated and Directed by Dr. Valerie Pye Sarah Ellis, Soprano Marek Zurowski, Tenor
POST THEATRE COMPANY
Dr. Valerie Clayman Pye, Director Kaira Gula, Juliet Brody Hampson, Romeo Beth Goddin, Chorus, Friar Lawrence, and Nurse
Costumes by Peter Fogel, Costume Shop Supervisor
VENUE
Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, Long Island University (LIU Post) 720 Northern Blvd, Brookville, NY 11548
BOX OFFICE
516.299.3100
TICKETS & SEASON
massphil.com · tillescenter.org
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