Russian Hours

From the Classical Vault Dept.: I’m not sure if this piece ever actually ran in Metroland – CD reviews, at least from me, wafted in an editorial limbo for a while – but I’m assigning the date on which it probably would have appeared. Although the likes of Beethoven and Mozart have warranted box sets of their complete works, to collect all of Prokofiev requires diligence. The sets reviewed below are helpful components.

                                                                                          

ALTHOUGH THE RECENT Bard Summerscape Prokofiev festival offered plenty of reasons to continue to celebrate that composer’s music, I’ve never required any extra excuse. Prokofiev managed the difficult feat of writing forward-thinking, challenging works livened with appealing melodies, fascinating rhythms, instrumental combinations that are surprising and satisfying and an old-fashioned sense of architectural cohesion. In short: great stuff.

Sergei Prokofiev

His seven symphonies – eight, if you count that fact that he re-worked number four and both versions remain in the repertory – could not be more varied. His first was a jewel-like tribute to Haydn, but sporting characteristically wide-leaping themes. The second, inspired by Beethoven, is a theme and variations of such fury that it’s like being stuck in a room with someone shouting at you. By 1944, the time of his fifth symphony, he’d stayed away from the form for several years and, influenced by the war, he wrote a sweeping, unsettling work that has become the most popular of his symphonies.

The popularity of number five unfairly overshadows the equally appealing sixth, while the final symphony, composed a year before Prokofiev’s death in 1952, returns to the more simple world of the first.

Complete recordings were a long time coming, but one of the best was pursued in the early 1980s, at the dawn of the digital age. In fact, Neeme Järvi and the Scottish National Orchestra recorded almost the entirety of Prokofiev’s orchestral works for Chandos, including the concertos and some ballet suites.

Along with the fact that these were the first recordings to reproduce the pieces in the expanded dynamic range that CDs allow is that fact that they’re terrific performances. They put both Järvi and the orchestra on the map as far as many listeners were concerned, and show him to be a worthy interpreter of these works, even alongside the likes of Karajan in warhorses like the Fifth Symphony.

But listen to Järvi’s Sixth for a key to the appeal. There’s a moment towards the end of the first movement when the orchestra is awash in sound, the brasses and winds tossing a plangent chord back and forth, a moment when it’s easy to lose the effect in general muddiness. Not here. And the crisp work of the strings in that symphony’s third movement shows how completely accomplished is this ensemble.

The symphonies were issued as LPs and CDs, with the latter reflecting the former’s shorter running time, generally featuring one symphony per disc with a different type of work to fill it out. They’ve recently been repackaged as a lower-priced slimline set, but you’ll want to fill them out with the six individual CDs of orchestral selections that also recently appeared in lower-priced reissues:

• Lt. Kije Suite, Stone Flower Suite, Autumnal, Andante and Dreams.
• The Prodigal Son, Divertimento Op. 43, another Andante, and the Symphonic Song
• Alexander Nevsky, Scythian Suite, Steel Dance Suite
• Four Portraits from The Gambler, Semyon Kotko Suite
• Buffoon Suite, Waltz Suite, Love for Three Oranges Suite
• Peter & the Wolf, Pushkiniana, Cinderella Suite

And note that “Peter and the Wolf” is narrated by Lina Prokofiev, the composer’s first wife, whose own story is the stuff of an opera–but here delivering a terrific account of the story, never mind that she did so in a non-native language for her and at the age of 88.

These aren’t all of the pieces that accompanied the original CD issue, and I miss the Romeo and Juliet suites and the Sinfonietta. But it’s a beautifully realized array of works, well known and somewhat obscure, that show the composer’s many other sides. Early works like “Autumnal” and “Dreams” offer fascinating insights into Prokofiev’s development; the music from “Semyon Koto” and “The Steel Dance” is rarely performed and thus a treat to hear and later works like “The Stone Flower,” with its haunting array of folktunes, are unfairly neglected.

My advice: Collect these recordings, get the two (out of three) volumes of Prokofiev’s diaries that recently have been published, and wallow in this composer’s life and work.

Prokofiev: Complete Symphonies
Prokofiev: Orchestral Works
Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi
Chandos

– Metroland Magazine, 8 January 2009