Word: prokofievs
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Ever since the late Serge Prokofiev's War and Peace got its first concert performance in Moscow in 1944, the world's opera houses have hankered to stage it. For one reason or another, none ever got far. The opera's jumbo length (eleven scenes which would spread over two four-hour performances), its 40 individual roles and choruses of several hundred, all proved too discouraging. But last week the Italian city of Florence put on a digested, four-hour version as the high spot of its May music festival, and as a triumphant coup over Milan...
Chief credit for both the production and the coup belonged to Veteran Conductor Artur Rodzinski. La Scala had arranged with the Soviet Ministry of Culture to produce next season a revised version of the opera (on which, the ministry said, Prokofiev had been making "technical changes"). Conductor Rodzinski, who now lives in Florence, had an idea that he could beat La Scala to the punch. He remembered that the Metropolitan Opera had once planned to produce War and Peace and that Manhattan's Leeds Music Corp. had a copy of the score...
...catalogued his findings in a 30-page "Invecticon," listing the strongest and most piquant critical epithets alphabetically, with composers to whom they have been applied. Samples: advanced cat music (Wagner), belly-rumbling (Bela Bartok), bestial outcries (Alban Berg), bleary-eyed paresis (Tchaikovsky), chaos (Bartok, Berg, Berlioz, Brahms, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Strauss, Wagner), intoxicated woodpecker (Edgar Varèse), lewd caterwauling (Wagner), mass-snoring (Bartok), nasty little noise (Debussy), spring fever in a zoo (Stravinsky...
...breaking the long sweep of a natural development to introduce another melody. There were other times when he dressed up a banal moment with humorous orchestral tweaks and twitches, or suddenly stirred up a bee's nest of climax. Only the fourth movement sounded thoroughly like the old Prokofiev; playfully capering themes rippled off into odd harmonic corners and back again almost before the listener knew what was happening...
...applauded the Seventh Symphony at the world premiere last fall, and Pravda itself stamped it doctrinally O.K. Philadelphia's dignified matinee audience, which had half expected to be buffeted and assaulted by modernist clangor, had a pleasant enough half hour, called Conductor Ormandy back for four bows. Sergei Prokofiev had done what he had been told to do: his symphony could be understood by almost anybody on a single hearing. A Philadelphia matron summed up his last work in a sentence. "It sounds," she sighed happily, "just like Gilbert & Sullivan." For Sergei Prokofiev, the composer who once seemed...