New member Ruby has a question to ask, so I've started this thread on her behalf.

The two complete versions I know best are those by Andre Previn with the LSO on EMI, and Lorin Maazel with the Cleveland on Decca, both made in the days of LP, but still both sounding great in their CD reincarnations. Of the two I prefer the Maazel, finding the Previn a little slower, so it sounds to me as if the Previn would do you very nicely. Not at all expensive at Amazon: £6.47 for the two-disc set plus postage if you buy it direct from them, or if you decide to use one of the parallel sellers they list as well you could save an extra couple of pounds, though your delivery time might be longer, as most of them tend to come from the States.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Romeo-Juliet-Previn-Sergey-Prokofiev/dp/B0002XV310/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1210857032&sr=1-3

I'm sure there'll be further additions to this thread before long. It's worth remembering that the demands of dance can have an effect on the speeds conductors use in the theatre and their vision of the piece thereafter, whilst those who only perform the work in the concert hall or recording studio without having ever had to cope with the different demands of timing for the stage are likely to have a freer approach.

The tempi used for the recording we learn a work by often dictate how we perceive it ever after, Ruby: one of the reasons maniacs like me try to keep at least two versions of a piece on the shelves: more chance to know the work rather than the performance.

The music is a ballet so I would treat yourself to the ballet!   There's a 2004 DVD of the ballet from the Bolshoi, with the Bolshoi Orchestra under Algis Zhuraitis, and danced by Bezsemrtnova & Mukhamedov (ie the "dream-team" cast for this picece).  "Amazon Sellers" have it for under £8.   Not only do you have the ballet itself, BUT the tempos imposed by synchronising with the choreography automatically bring this nearer to what Prokofiev must have intended for the piece

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Romeo-Juliet-Prokofiev-Natalya-Bessmertnova/dp/B0002TXSSA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1210859393&sr=1-1

By far the unlikeliest person I've ever understudied, when he played the King in a Covent Garden Festival Production of The King and I (at the Masonic Grand Temple, no less). The fact that I fitted the costumes and have a convincing Russian accent seem to have swayed the production team: it certainly wasn't my dancing.

 Lovely guy, by the way, very funny.

And you'll find out a lot more.

Reminds me of a friend who said "I used to listen to The Archers until I moved to X" (X = village near Reading.)  Why listen to fiction, when you have got a real life soap opera to hand?  And that's what this place can be as well.

In fact I find I am alarmingly revealing about myself a time in ways I would never be face to face....

As I also say, its far cheaper than therapy.

Ooh thanks for your thoughts on the Previn.  That clinches it (I don't need much.)

I really need to listen to it again soon, and with the absence of my favourite recording I need to get another one.  I was drawn to it by the obvious Dance of the Knights but the rest of it then rather quickly overtook it.  I was trying to play my favourite bit to a friend (several sequences of increasing ascendence (9 notes up, 7 down) that peak at a rather heart wrenching chord - sorry I can't name any of them - I don't even know what key it's in!!) but it just served to remind me how much I dislike my recording and I stopped looking before I found it. 

I had thought that it was in Juliet's death but didn't find it there (what an oddly poetic sentence.)

 

Hang on there, bbm: you're automatically assuming (i) that Ruby lives anywhere near other people on the board and (ii) that she might actually want to meet any of us.