Word: prokofievs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...monumental Ninth Symphony (conducted by Arturo Toscanini) and a much more esoteric score, Berlioz' symphonic scenes, Harold in Italy. Last week Billboard's music sleuths found the public foraging still farther afield. Among the ten best-selling concert LPs: Cherubini's Symphony in D (Victor), Prokofiev's Symphony No. 7 (Columbia), and Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony (London...
...Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No. 8 (Anthony di Bonaventura; #&134; Classic Editions). First LP of a work composed during the war, when Prokofiev was successfully fusing his modernist enthusiasm with his genuine romantic tenderness. It is consistently attractive and warmhearted, sometimes teeters on the edge of sentimentality. Performance: good, if on the chilly side...
...attentively to the music but with one ear cocked to audience response. For about two hours, the comedy went on, its performers (from the Punch Opera company) obviously enjoying their slightly bawdy roles. The score, with its occasional tang of dissonance and its shifting harmonies, sounded like slightly clouded Prokofiev, contained some lively ensemble passages and as large a share of waltzes as Rosenkavalier. If few listeners were carried away, it may have been because the plot of Ben Jonson's old comedy seemed pretty far removed from 1953 Manhattan, or perhaps because the music dropped its best tunes...
Florence's version turned out to be more of a musical epic than a traditional opera, but the music was Prokofiev's most melodious and the performance first class. The first act, most of it set in the gardens and salons of Moscow's early 19th century aristocracy, took care of "peace." The music of this act was light and tuneful, almost in the style of French or Italian chamber music. The other two acts turned warlike, and their music was richly Russian. At the end of Act II, a powerful chorus of defiance was chanted while...
...Prokofiev's aristocrats were snobbish, idle, worthless people; his masses were the salt of the earth. Officially, the Communists did not attend, but the Communist press turned handsprings in praise of Prokofiev's work and its ideological message. Some critics, obviously unfamiliar with Leo Tolstoy's monumental novel, had trouble following the plot, and small wonder: about the only original characters who came through were Pierre, the high-born hero who learned to love the Russian people through suffering with them, and Natasha, the simple girl who returned to her first love when...