by Richard Buell
The Chorus Pro Musica's account of Roméo et Juliette last Saturday served as a counterweight to the quite different rendition — powerfully concen-trated and hair-trigger-responsive — that Berlioz's genre-defying Dramatic Symphony got from James Levine and the BSO back in December. The latter was so well-oiled that you could occasionally forget what exactly it was a performance of. In rehearsal, Levine kept stressing leanness — a quality not much in evidence in the BSO style of playing over recent decades. Not so with CpM director Jeffrey Rink, who had at his disposal an orchestra of 65 and a chorus of 100 from which a chamber chorus of 10 was drawn. Nobody had to force, and nobody did. The venue being Jordan Hall, whenever there was transparency, elegance, or warmth to be had, that's what we got. Mezzo Janice Felty's lustrous, supple, intelligent singing spoke volumes. High marks also to tenor Chad Freeburg, who mustered up the quality and speed of utterance to keep his Queen Mab solo from sounding like a G&S patter song in translation. Plangent and dignified in tone, Robert Honeysucker achieved a near-miracle with the moralizing bore that is Friar Laurence. And Rink proved an uninsistent, letting-things-happen conductor. The Love Scene glowed. If the period-style orchestra often sounded one rehearsal short of real security, there was compensation in such moments as seeing and hearing Douglas Yeo play a real ophicleide — beautifully And there was the chorus: sonorous, responsive, brimming with conviction, not least in the opening piece, “Sara la baigneuse,” a sweetly buoyant setting of Victor Hugo's poem about what would now be called a wardrobe malfunction.