Word: prokofievs
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...contrast, Monreal's second contribution, "Classical Symphony" to Prokofiev, shows off the company's technical powers and little besides. Ron Cunningham's "Holberg Suite," Frank Ohman's "Serenata," and Helen Heineman's "Sinfonia" do the same. Traditionally choreographed in alternating sections for soloists and the corps de ballet, the works don't give themselves the chance to develop a broader vision...
...lives, in fact, provide a more poignant illustration of those contradictions than that of the Soviet composer who died at 68 of heart disease outside Moscow. Along with Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Shostakovich was one of the masters of contemporary Russian music. Throughout his long creative life, his works went in and out of capricious official favor with a regularity that Shostakovich must have found dispiriting as well as baffling. His First Symphony, written in 1925 when he was 18, revealed such mastery of orchestration and startling harmonic originality that his reputation was immediately established. He believed in the ideals...
When Hitler's armies marched into the Soviet Union in 1941, the Russian people's fight for survival inspired Sergei Prokofiev to write an opera that would embody their struggle. His hugely ambitious choice for a story: Tolstoy's War and Peace. What he finally produced in 1943, however, was written in an almost schizoid style-part introspective love story, part heroic showpiece-that was difficult to grasp, easy to misunderstand. Stalin's commissars gave only grudging approval, demanded more pageantry and patriotic fervor. At his death in 1953, the composer was still rewriting the work...
...Prokofiev's opera might as well have been called Peace and War. It starts well along in the Tolstoy novel, with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky on a visit to Count Rostov's country estate, musing on the seeming emptiness of his life, then discovering Rostov's beautiful daughter Natasha. That and the next six scenes depict, with a mixture of passion, intrigue and despair, the decadent social life of prewar Russia. The last six scenes are devoted to the French invasion of 1812. Napoleon struts nervously (to the accompaniment of diabolic fanfares in brass), while Russian Field Marshal...
...never what it is not. It is an epic; but unlike the heroes of Verdi or Wagner, Napoleon and Kutuzov never meet face to face, nor do we ever see Andrei suffer his fatal wound, nor can Natasha save him. But although War and Peace is no lyric drama, Prokofiev is capable of remarkably delicate touches, like the soft rasping of strings that evoke the delirium of Andrei's death scene...