Word: prokofiev
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...PROKOFIEV: WAR AND PEACE (3 LPs; Heliodor). Tolstoy's epic is not the easiest assignment in operatic composing, but by concentrating on the love story of Prince Andrei and Natasha, and Kuturov's defeat of Napoleon, Prokofiev has done a surprisingly effective job. Instead of beginning with a big party scene, he shrewdly chooses a tender picture of longing and rebirth when Andrei hears Natasha and Sonya on their balcony. The composer has written the girls a soprano duet that recalls Strauss's lyricism. Here and elsewhere, the voices of Radmilla Vasovic Bokacevic and Biserka Cvejic...
GARY GRAFFMAN: PROKOFIEV PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 1 AND 3 (Columbia). Some performers create, some dominate, some execute and others merely recite. Gary Graffman executes, and Prokofiev is his perfect victim. Dazzling fireworks abound in this recording of two percussive concertos, and connoisseurs of pyrotechnics will find nothing missing in Graffman's display; others may hunger for heart in this admittedly impressive recording...
...version by Bronislava Nijinska. Last week the Ballet Theater showed off Jerome Robbins' dazzling choreography for it in a vigorous, soulful ensemble tour de force. The Americans also drew 17 curtain calls when they unveiled Eliot Feld's Harbinger, a lively and neatly dovetailed abstraction set to Prokofiev's Fifth Piano Concerto. It was a week of delightful dilemmas for the audiences, but nobody had more fun with it than the dancers themselves...
...sway school of playing, but he has temperament and spunk, a luminous tone and a controlled technique. Out of a contrasting assortment of half a dozen pieces, he delivered a fine, full-blooded performance of Bach's Sonata No. 4, blazed easily through the trickiest passages of Prokofiev's Sonata in D Major, and captured the dark warmth of Brahms's deceptively difficult Sonata in A Major...
STRAVINSKY: L'HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT and PROKOFIEV: QUINTET, OPUS 39 (Melodiya-Angel). Written at the end of World War I, Histoire is a clever little musical outrage featuring a demented tango, ragtime gone wrong, a satanic mockery of a Bach chorale, and countless other musical japes in the story of a soldier who sells his soul to the Devil, wins it back and finally loses it again. The Prokofiev is also dramatic, originally composed for a ballet about a circus. The Moscow Chamber Ensemble, led by Gennedy Rozhdestvensky, has just the right touch for both: cool, brusque, almost offhandish...