Word: prokofiev
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...York Philharmonic (Sun. 2:30 p.m., CBS). Conductor: Leonard Bernstein. Soloist: Violinist Isaac Stern playing Prokofiev's Second Concerto...
...Prokofiev & Tolstoy The U.S. witnessed a major musical event this week: the American premiere of the late Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace. Although the composer finished his first version while the Germans were still rumbling toward Stalingrad, the sprawling work, which in one version took eight hours, had been performed only once before outside Russia (in Florence, in 1953). The present 2½hour edition-brilliantly produced in an English translation by NBC-TV's enterprising Opera Theater, and conducted by Peter Herman Adler-was. the version Prokofiev himself approved before his death four years...
...libretto, by Prokofiev and his wife, Poetess Mira Mendelsohn, arbitrarily hacked great chunks out of the Tolstoy epic without ever linking them in true dramatic tension. Tolstoy's own brilliant literary counterpoint-in which he switched from peace to war scenes and back-was abandoned. All the peace was concentrated in the first part, all the war in the second, so that many of the figures in Part I suddenly dropped out of sight. Moreover, the libretto was narrative rather than dramatic, required whole passages of flat prose to be set to music, with the result that long stretches...
...Prokofiev moved from personal emotion to glorification of the Russian masses, he was less successful, but nevertheless produced some fine choruses-e.g., the troops in praise of General Kutuzov, the citizens in a hymn of thanks for victory. The second part also produced the most authoritative acting-and one of the finest voices-in Baritone Kenneth Smith, who played General Kutuzov with sinewy dignity. High point of the opera came in one of the closing scenes, in which Andrey and Natasha were reunited as Andrey lay on his deathbed. Through his delirium he hears a pulsing beat, played...
...Opera (Sun. 1:30 p.m., NBC). U.S. premiere of Prokofiev's War and Peace...