by liberal japonicus
I was looking at some pages about the war in Ukraine and it noted in passing that Donetsk airport, which was the site of Ukrainian resistance in 2014 before the Minsk agreement, was officially named Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev airport because Prokofiev was born in the region. This had me think that Prokofiev might be a good Weekend Music thread and sent me down the rabbit hole.
My favorite Prokofiev work is his Symphony #1. While I was tempted to give you a Russian orchestra doing it, because I think that Russians do their music better than others, but Russian orchestras also seem to go a lot faster than other orchestras. My working theory is that they get paid by the piece, so they want to finish as soon as possible. It makes the 1st and 4th movements really pop, but for me, the 2nd movement is the one I love to listen to. (There’s a further problem that Gergiev, currently the leading Russian conductor, is vehemently pro-Putin, so there’s that as well) This version is by the Mexican conductor Alondra de la Parra and the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra. The symphony is called ‘The Classical’ because it is supposed to be a neo-classical version of a Haydn or Mozart opera and was written in 1917 during the Russian Revolution, which I find ironic. I don’t want to post any Gergiev, but I also found this version by George Szell and Cleveland, the usual time for the symphony is 15-16 minutes, the Szell version clocks in at 12:32!
I always had an image of Prokofiev as a dilettante, probably stemming from Peter and the Wolf and my own prejudice of a story told with background music isn’t really on the same level as a symphony or a concerto. In looking for stuff, I found this version narrated by David Bowie and performed by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra and it is gripping.
Another reason for thinking Prokofiev was that I never played any of his music, which is definitely my loss, and I was listening to his Piano Concertos because the wikipedia page for the concerto had this observation.
The 22-year-old composer-pianist won the Anton Rubinstein Prize for pianistic accomplishments in an 18 May 1914 performance of the work before the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He had proposed his own concerto for the programme, reasoning that, though he may not be able to win with a classical concerto, with his own concerto the jury would be “unable to judge whether he was playing well or not.” Competition rules required that the piece be published, so Prokofiev found a publisher willing to produce 20 copies in time for the event. The jury headed by Alexander Glazunov awarded Prokofiev the prize rather reluctantly.
So I went and listened to it, and I have to say, it made me ridiculously happy to hear the same motif in the 1st concerto (written in 1911 at the age of 19) at 6:50 that appeared at 1:46 in the symphony, written in 1916 (at the tender age of 24). Parts of the concerto, especially the clarinet, seemed to anticipate Gershwin, though Prokofiev, who met Gershwin in the 20’s, didn’t really have much time for his music.
One thing about Prokofiev, his musical palette is one that you can really hear in movie music. In fact his Lt. Kije suite has a ton of themes (I guess these were memes before we had that name) that have been recycled into all sorts of media we consume. This is a neat video (in French) about how Sting borrowed the motifs of the suite for his song Russians and at the end, has a portion of a Sting concert that starts with the theme from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet and goes into Russians.
I mentioned that the airport in Ukraine was named after Prokofiev, and he is an interesting case in that he was the only major Russian émigré composer to return to the Soviet Union. I’ve been able to read David Nice’s biography From Russia to the West 1891-1935, discussing Prokofiev up until the time he chose to go back to the Soviet Union, and I’ve just started Simon Morrison’s The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years, which details his career in the Soviet Union. It’s hard to listen to music from this period, because it is so wrapped up with the issues of Stalin and the Soviet Union. For example:
Zdravitsa, Op. 85, (Russian: Здра́вицаA, lit. ’Toast!’, Russian pronunciation: [ˈzdravʲɪt͡sə]) is a cantata written by Sergei Prokofiev in 1939 to celebrate Stalin’s 60th birthday. Its title is sometimes translated as Hail to Stalin in English.
After Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union, he was viewed as a suspect in the eyes of the Stalinist regime and was under scrutiny. Numerous Soviet artists had already been arrested or even executed for creating art that was deemed too ‘formalistic’ by Soviet officials. Indeed, when Prokofiev collaborated with theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold for his opera Semyon Kotko, the opera’s premiere was postponed due to Meyerhold being arrested on 20 June 1939. Meyerhold was executed on 2 February 1940. In October 1939, Prokofiev was invited to write Zdravitsa for the approaching celebrations of Stalin’s 60th birthday on 21 December.