Word: prokofievs
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Russia's Sergei Prokofiev had been told months ago by the party's Central Committee how to write music. But had he really listened...
...first glance: a Soviet pilot loses both feet in a crash, manages to fly again to prove his devotion to Stalin and the motherland. What more could a composer do? A good deal more, apparently, if he was to satisfy the music-loving Central Committee. Said Culture and Life: Prokofiev's music for the Tale of a Real Person was "in screaming contradiction with the text . . . hard on the ear and lacking in melody for singing . . . really insulting for a Soviet audience...
...orchestra glided into the opening bars of Sergei Prokofiev's score and the curtain went up on Cinderella. Then, for two hours, an eager-to-be-enchanted audience found plenty of reason to be. With her thistledown lightness and grace, pert, piquant Moira Shearer (dancing star of the movie Red Shoes) danced well and looked the part of Cinderella. Her two ugly sisters, one of them danced by Choreographer Ashton himself, couldn't have been uglier, and her prince (Michael Somes) couldn't have been more charming. Reported the London Daily Mail: "The curtain calls seemed...
...calls were for the Sadler's Wells top choreographer, lean, 42-year-old Freddie Ashton, whom London critics were quick to praise as "the first Englishman to devise a full-length ballet." He had used most of the gay, though sometimes brittle and bony score that Prokofiev had composed on a Kremlin commission during the war, but he had taken nothing of the Bolshoi Theater's spectacular and even longer ballet. A typical difference: while Ashton has his hero stay close to home, the Russians sent their Prince Charming chasing around the world after the glass slipper...
Berkshire Festival (Tues. 9:30 p.m., ABC). Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony in a program of Prokofiev, Sibelius, Ravel and Strauss...