Word: prokofievs
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...Sergei Prokofiev was an established musical revolutionary of 26 when the Bolsheviks spread flame and famine across Russia in 1917. He had outjangled Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in his pagan Scythian Suite, startled St. Petersburg's musical society with the thudding energy of his piano pieces. When he wanted to-as he showed in his Classical Symphony -he could write with sweet simplicity. But he seldom cared to prove it. "I believe," he wrote, "that it is a mistake to favor musical simplification...
...Prokofiev, the son of the manager of a large estate, was no political revolutionary. In 1918 he got himself a passport and took off across Siberia and the Pacific for the U.S. For the next 15 years he was a free-footed citizen of the world-composing operas (his Love for Three Oranges was premiered in Chicago in 1921), ballets (he collaborated with Paris' famed Impresario Serge Diaghilev for 15 years) and piano concertos which he himself triumphantly played on tour. At 40, he ranked with Strauss, Stravinsky and Schoenberg as one of the world's most challenging...
Musical life in the Soviet Union was complex. As early as 1936, Prokofiev was slapped on the wrist for composing in too "urbanized" a manner. He corrected this by drawing on popular subjects, and casting them in heroic molds, as he did in his huge score for the film Alexander Nevsky. But, along with six other composers, including Shostakovich and Khachaturian, he was in hot water again in 1948, when the Communist commissars complained that his music was too full of "formalism" -i.e., it was too tricky for the Soviet public to understand easily-and that he should compose with...
...arranging got him high marks, and he worked for such bandleaders as Tommy Tucker and Claude Thornhill, looking for ideas in his favorite composers -Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev and Bach. When he turned to playing, he could blow ragtime, Dixieland, the blues and bop, but he refused to be categorized: "It would be senseless to start playing and sound like anybody else...
...Prokofiev: Oratorio, Op. 124 (Choirs and State Orchestra of the U.S.S.R. conducted by Samuel Samossoud; Vanguard). Prokofiev's latest (1950) composition to reach U.S. shores. The message is the expected and politic one of the clear skies and a bright future, but there is plenty of drama in the ten movements, provided by scenes from World War II (climax: Stalingrad) and a warmhearted, slightly Wagneresque lullaby...