Word: prokofiev
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Prokofiev: "Alexander Nevsky" Cantata (Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting, Jennie Tourel and the Westminster Choir; Columbia, 10 sides). Russia's greatest living composer shuttles from Gregorian chants to jazzy brass fanfares in this expanded, concert-hall version of his score for a Sergei Eisenstein film. Performance: good...
...posers. In the main building the composers eat, sleep, loaf and criticize each other's music. Nearby are five dachas, or cottages, where each composer can lock himself in to work in privacy. There, during the past two summers, Shostakovich finished his Eighth Symphony, Khachaturian, his Second, and Prokofiev finished his Fifth and began his Sixth. Prokofiev worked in a glassed-in verandah - containing couch, grand piano, chair and table -overlooking a pond where Ivanovo village kids swim...
...Prokofiev's music, like everybody else's in Soviet Russia, has to be okayed first by his fellow composers in a private "sitting," before it can be played in public. The sittings were pretty rough during the 1936-37 purge of "formalism" in music - which meant an end to fancy musical tricks that the masses could not understand. Shosta kovich was a prime target, and Prokofiev caught a few glancing blows. Now, considering that at one sitting rival composers can make or break a year's work by one of their colleagues, the sessions are fairly harmonious...
...first Prokofiev, the ex-emigre, was held suspect by the others, but the indus try with which he turned out marching songs and heroic legends during the war, despite recent stretches of illness, seems to have proved his musical patriotism...
...well that job has been done can be judged from the worldwide fame of Composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich...