Word: prokofieff
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When the long-awaited news finally arrived, it was a big letdown. Sergei Prokofieff's monumental opera, War and Peace (promised by Stalin to the Metropolitan Opera after a Soviet premiere) had a concert run-through last week at the Moscow Conservatory. An audience of professional musicians, squirming through the sceneryless nine scenes, vigorously applauded the classic melodies, found the unwieldy Tolstoyan libretto tough going and concluded that the opera was far from finished...
Already operagoers had one big disappointment: the plan for a U.S. premiere of Serge Prokofieff's new opera based on Tolstoy's War and Peace, which might have been the sensation of the season, had been called off. Reason: Joseph Stalin insisted on a Moscow premiere first...
...ping-ponged between Blues-Singer Libby Holman and mopey Actor Morris Carnovsky. The famous suspense with which Director Sergei Eisenstein prefaced the battle in Alexander Nevsky has been unmercifully hacked when half a minute of editorial discretion would have kept it whole, and the excellent battle music which Prokofieff contrived for that sequence becomes an aural trunk murder. Eisenstein's appalling scene in which soldiers drive civilians down a great flight of steps. in Odessa (Potemkiri) has also been tampered with -it is now a shambles instead of a few minutes of cinema as brilliantly organized as a movement...
...Prokofieff: Classical Symphony (St. Louis Symphony, Vladimir Golschmann conducting; Victor; 4 sides). The deftest work of modern "neoclassicism" (in which composers play with the mannerisms of Corelli's period) is given a performance not quite as neat as Dimitri Mitropoulos' splendid version (Columbia...
...clock on Sunday afternoons. During its span it has featured such conductors as Leopold Stokowski, Frank Black and Arturo Toscanini, the last performing everything from a superb Brahms' cycle to "The Stars and Stripes Forever." This program has not, however, been backward in introducing new works, performing for example, Prokofieff's music for "Alexander Nevsky," and a Stravinsky symphony...