Word: prokofiev
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...program made a pass at traditional music (an opera by Prokofiev, piano works by Debussy and Ravel), but the score card was overwhelmingly modern: a sampling of contemporary Italian music played by the Milan Radio Orchestra, a concert of atonal chamber works by France's Parrenin Quartet, an opera by Germany's Werner Egk. The tone of the festival reflected Tito's promise of a free hand, but Chief Organizer Milko Keleman, 37, an instructor in composition at Zagreb Conservatory, was understandably anxious when Cultural Relations Commissar Drago Vucinic showed up for a concert of electronic works...
...Sergei Prokofiev was one of seven Soviet composers (among the others: Khachaturian and Shostakovich) denounced in 1948 "for formalistic and anti-democratic tendencies in music which are alien to the Soviet people." Confessing his "guilt," the great Russian composer promised to mend his Western ways in his next opera, which proved to be his last. Ten months later. The Story of a Real Man was submitted to the Composers' Union, was promptly banned as "anti-melodious" and still reeking with "the decay of bourgeois culture." Now, long after his official post-Stalin rehabilitation and seven years after his death...
...opera proved that the cultural commissars Lad a supersensitive nose for bourgeois decay and no ear for music. They had completely ignored a libretto that wallowed in patriotism, and a highly melodious score. Based on a Stalin prize-winning novel, Prokofiev's Story tells of a World War II pilot who lost both legs in a crash and lived to fly again, after a harrowing, 17-day crawl behind enemy lines (enacting this scene, the opera's hero sings flat on his belly). With the composer and his wife themselves adapting the tale, the entire effort seems...
Peter and the Wolf (Beatrice Lillie; London Symphony Orchestra; London). The ineffable Bea seems to take Prokofiev's fable with what Max Beerbohm called "a stalactite of salt." Her impish spoofery is just what this staid and somewhat self-conscious classic now needs...
...read somewhere of how Prokofiev wrote a classical symphony in middle life," says he, "and I decided I wanted to draw like the old masters. Not because I thought it would do me good, but just because I wanted to." His figures now became bold and clear, though they seemed to swim out of a background of murky mystery. In 1953 he did a painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware-"the corniest patriotic idea I could find." He left his officers and men only partly finished, scattered them across the canvas almost arbitrarily. (The painting was one of the casualties...