The Juliet Letters is a studio album by the British rock singer and songwriter Elvis Costello and British string quartet Brodsky Quartet, released in 1993 by Warner Bros. Records. Costello described the album as "a song sequence for string quartet and voice and it has a title. It's a little bit different. It's not a rock opera. It's a new thing." The Juliet Letters is considered a song cycle. It peaked at No. 18 on the UK Albums Chart, and at No. 125 on the Billboard 200.
Content Costello first encountered the Brodsky Quartet in 1989, a performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall of the entire cycle of string quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich. They met for the first time in November 1991, to begin work on the concept and execution of this album project. Costello viewed this album as neither his first stab at classical music, nor the Brodsky's first attempt at rock and roll.
With a concept of imaginary letters being sent to an imaginary recipient, Juliet Capulet, all five musicians contributed to the writing of the lyrics as well as the music. No overdubs were made, the album recorded in its entirety live in the studio. One single was released from the album, the track "Jacksons, Monk, and Rowe," although it did not chart in either the United States or the UK.
Release history The album was released initially on compact disc in 1993. As part of the Rhino Records reissue campaign for Costello's back catalogue from Demon/Columbia and Warners, it was re-released in 2006 with 18 additional tracks on a bonus disc. The bonus disc included additional musicians to Costello and the Brodsky Quartet, with some tracks recorded live at the 1995 Meltdown Festival. This reissue is out of print; the album was reissued again by Universal Music Group after its acquisition of Costello's complete catalogue in 2006. A new edition of the sheet music was released on 15 September 2023, edited by Jacqueline Thomas and Paul Cassidy, published exclusively by Hal Leonard.
Legacy Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic deemed it another of the "deliberately noncommercial, non-representative records" that Costello made for Warner Bros., adding "it's not just that he made a record as anti-pop as Mighty Like a Rose, it's that he followed it with a full-fledged classical album." He found it surprising that the label released the album as it "just doesn't fit anywhere", deeming this the album's intriguing feature. "This is a distinctive, unusual affair that, at its best, effectively marries chamber music with Beatlesque art pop."
Naming it Costello's 21st best album, Michael Galluici of Ultimate Classic Rock found it inevitable that Costello would eventually make "a full-scale classical recording" like The Juliet Letters, finding the song cycle to be admirable and "certainly ambitious" but also "a bit boring. He sounds out of place among the cello and violin; likewise, the quartet can't escape its confines when called upon to move outside its genre." Al Shipley of Spin commented that The Juliet Letters is the best of Costello's ventures outside the pop/rock sphere; though noting that the musician's lyrics were inspired by Romeo and Juliet, "Costello writes comfortably in modern diction instead of contorting himself into Shakespearean English. And the tight, economical sound of four instruments suits him almost as if he and the Attractions were playing violin, viola and cello."
Recordings and performances by other artists Several artists have either recorded or mounted productions of the song cycle. In 2016, The Sacconi Quartet and Jon Boden (former lead singer of the folk group Bellowhead) performed The Juliet Letters in St Martin's Church, Colchester, as part of the Roman River Festival. Voice department faculty of the Berklee College of Music performed the music with a student string quartet in a recital on 18 April 2019.
Track listing
Personnel Elvis Costello – vocal Michael Thomas – violin Ian Belton – violin Paul Cassidy – viola Jacqueline Thomas – cello
Charts + Chart performance for The Juliet Letters Chart (1993) Peakposition Australian Albums (ARIA) N.B. The High Point number in the NAT column represents the release's peak on the national chart. 106
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