CD Booklet: LPO-0106 Prokofiev Chout and other works

PROKOFIEV VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 1 SYMPHONY NO. 3 CHOUT RÊVES ALEXANDER LAZAREV conductor VADIM REPIN violin SIMON CALLOW narrator LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

SERGEI PROKOFIEV The First World War and its aftermath played havoc with the hopes and dreams of the young Prokofiev. Up to 1915, his path seemed easy and assured: from the creation of snappy piano miniatures and an early symphony in 1908 to the one-act ballet commissioned by Diaghilev several weeks before war broke out, all went well. It was with incredible confidence, not to say clairvoyance, that Prokofiev declared in that year, ‘I am in no doubt that given time my classic status will be beyond contention’.

Undeniably true, but Prokofiev was destined to see many important projects fall by the wayside, productions cancelled – including the original operatic settings of Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler and Bryusov’s The Fiery Angel, stalling over which led him to rework the material into his third symphony – and much else turn to dust and ashes in the years following his return to the Soviet Union in 1936. Back in 1911, however, he had everything to hope for. Rêves (Dreams) was one of the few works he did not subsequently revise, unlike its more sombre companion-piece Autumnal. In 1927 Konstantin Sarazhev, the conductor responsible for its initial success in May 1911, resurrected Dreams during Prokofiev’s first visit to what was now the Soviet Union. Describing it in his diary as ‘sweet, gentle, rather soporific’, the composer observed: ‘if my style has changed now, so much the better: everybody will see what

I represented in the past and what I have now become.’

Perhaps Prokofiev did not revise the work simply because it represents that impressionistic, late-romantic vein so well, and because the orchestration – including triple woodwind, six horns and two harps – is, for the piece in question, unimprovable. In his autobiography, hardly less blunt than the more immediate 1927 diary, Prokofiev admits that the dedication of Dreams to Scriabin – clearly there in the manuscripts to ‘the composer who began with Reverie’ – shows more resolve to follow in the footsteps of his then-idol than the music itself. Indeed, the obsessive opening figurations on muted second violas and violins bring us closer to a work he mentions in connection with Autumnal, Rachmaninoff’s haunting The Isle of the Dead. The two melodic ideas are suggestive and atmospheric rather than expansive, and there are two rich climaxes, restrained in comparison to Scriabin who made such a powerful impact on the adolescent Prokofiev and his fellow students, but effective none the less; after the first, earlier dreams resurface in their original form and after the second the music returns to its hypnotic starting point.

Having anticipated conducting Dreams himself in August 1913, when in fact he only played

the solo role in his First Piano Concerto – and after sketching ‘a beautiful, tender theme’ for an intended Violin Concertino, Prokofiev set off for Berlin, Paris – where, inter alia, he saw the Ballets Russes’ Petrushka (though not the new sensation of the season, The Rite of Spring) – and London, where he witnessed Diaghilev’s selective version of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov with Chaliapin in the title role. One year later he finally met the great impresario in London, first for lunch and a play-through including his Second Piano Concerto which ‘sent him into ecstasies,’ according to the 1914 diary, then a second meeting at the Cecil Hotel where Diaghilev wondered if the Concerto might be choreographed, and finally at the Savoy. This time Diaghilev recommended meeting up with ‘a proper Russian writer, [Sergey] Gorodetsky, for example’ when Prokofiev returned to St Petersburg.

The result, Ala and Lolly, based on a tale of Russian’s primitive ancestors, was too close to the world of The Rite of Spring for comfort; Diaghilev never cared for repetition of a successful formula. Much of the music was repackaged into the Scythian Suite, which was something of a succès de scandale at its concert premiere in the summer concert hall of Pavlovsky outside St Petersburg.

Braving a difficult journey through war-torn Europe in 1915, Prokofiev met up again with Diaghilev, his new young lover the dancer and choreographer Leonide Massine and – eventually – Stravinsky to discuss a different theme. This was to give a novel twist on the sadism inflicted on Stravinsky’s puppet Petrushka. A fantastical, desensitised reflection of the Russian capacity for wife-battering, so unflinchingly depicted in Maxim Gorky’s autobiographical writings, Chout (The Buffoon) is a vivid tale drawn from Alexander Afanasyev’s comprehensive folk-tale collection, with plenty of scope for laughter at its ingenious savagery.

The voluminous ballet score starts with what Prokofiev described as ‘whirring and rattling… as if dust were being wiped off the orchestra at the beginning of the performance’. Curtain up: enter the buffoon and his wife, sidling on with a sinuous, Russia-meets-the-east melody on solo wind against a seething chromatic backdrop typical of Prokofiev’s style in the 1920s; the buffoon explains his plan and they execute a spangled victory dance complete with brilliant orchestral chuckles. Seven other buffoons appear in a garish wash of orchestral colour to watch a pantomime they take for real; the buffoon and his wife argue in discordant Scythian style, he strikes her supposedly dead at the height of the brassy discords and resurrects her with his ‘magic’ whip to a

mysterious weave of clarinets. The dupes take counsel, buy the whip and clear the stage for the conspirators to rejoice in their good luck.

Another densely supported melody with oriental inflections introduces us to the home of the seven buffoons. Their waiting wives are altogether more delicate, but the brutes are back and a sharp-edged fugato on the scene’s opening melody leads to a shrill repetition of the first wife-murder – this time for real.

There are wry hints of the charlatan’s music from Petrushka as the buffoons vainly ply the whip (an upward flick of piccolo and piano).

A frantic, whirling reapplication of the whip achieves nothing and the buffoons mourn the most feminine of the wives’ themes in an Andante lugubre. Back at buffoon No. 1’s house there is panic – with a rare touch of metrical variety – before the vengeful seven return. The uproar cuts short as the buffoon reappears disguised as his own sister. The buffoons interrogate the ‘sister’ (trumpets) and despite her plangent protests, carry her off to be their cook.

A stately oriental melody with glittering accompaniment – the tuba hints at lurking brutality – finds the buffoons awaiting a rich merchant who has come to choose a bride from their seven daughters; the daughters spin like tops in a vivace nimbly launched by strings.

Brass discords hail the arrival of the merchant, a true Russian to judge from his singing theme, which is subjected to ever thicker orchestration as he falls in love, not with any of the daughters, but with the cook. Brassy violence then reaches its apogee as the unsuccessful would-be-brides are soundly thrashed.

The longest of the interludes makes no return to the opening mockery, but instead glides serenely into the merchant’s bedroom, where he serenades his new love on the wedding-night; the buffoon’s embarrassment is represented by a pecking motif on cor anglais and morbid trumpets, resulting in the oddest of love duets. The merchant lets his quacking, indisposed ‘bride’ down from the bedroom window in a sheet; but his sweet dreams are shattered by what comes back up: a goat – witchcraft! Panic breaks out on violins playing sul ponticello (close to the bridge of the instrument); the servants arrive and shake the goat with Scythian chanting, culminating in an orchestral orgy.

The transformed ‘wife’ dies, mourned by interlude meditations on the first buffoon’s theme and buried in a ritual which evokes that of Stravinsky’s ancestors in The Rite of Spring without actually parodying it. The poor merchant is savagely mocked by the thwarted buffoons, and there is militaristic

uproar as the protagonist reappears as himself in the company of seven soldiers, stomping his demands of compensation for his dead ‘sister’. Then having authoritatively dismissed the merchant in a heavy brass variation of his main motif, he flips back into clownish mood with a sprightly dance-tune on solo violin, complemented by an even simpler ditty brightly proposed by the three clarinets; and so this often grotesquely-scored tale ends in a riot of high spirits.

A gentler mode frames the First Violin Concerto, surely that concertino theme of spring 1913.

It was, however, against the background of 1917’s February Revolution that work on the Concerto finally blossomed. ‘How could it have happened that he did not hear the true music of the Revolution?’ asks Prokofiev’s dutiful Soviet biographer, Israel Nestyev. It happened because the young composer spent very little time in the cities during the turbulent months leading up to the yet more crucial events that October. Both the ‘Classical’ Symphony and the First Violin Concerto, alongside a new-found passion for astronomy, occupied his calm thoughts in the country so near to a turbulent Petrograd, and yet so far from its unquiet spirit (he had, admittedly, toyed with the Concerto while shooting carried on beneath his window in the city that February).

Arguably it was the limpid purity of Russia’s eastern rivers that found its way in to the orchestration of the First Violin Concerto.

The river trip was a holiday that Prokofiev the careful Soviet autobiographer would be at pains to pass over. A detour took him as far east as the foot of the Ural mountains, where he described the scenery as ‘wild, virginal and exceptionally beautiful, with its red mountainous shores covered in dark Siberian pines’. The more aggressive vein he thought Diaghilev would want for his ballet score had made him ‘cool towards the lyricism of my Violin Concerto’. So only its aggressive scherzo took any kind of shape before the nature-idylls of 1917.

Years of displacement and uncertainty intervened before the Concerto’s first performance in Paris on 18 October 1923, with the 18-year-old leader of Koussevitzky’s orchestra, Marcel Darrieux as soloist.

‘Now, to be sure, I’d do a lot of it very differently’, Prokofiev told another settler in Paris, the musicologist Pyotr Souvchinsky. Pure song for the soloist at the very beginning of a violin concerto was certainly nothing new, and the Parisian audience looked down its nose at one possible source, the Mendelssohn Concerto, though the start of the Sibelius Concerto is an equally plausible influence.

Between the fugitive visions of the outer

movements, the scherzo - the movement he liked best in 1923 - runs wild with every conceivable violinistic effect: pizzicato, harmonics, spiccato (or staccato bowing) and sul ponticello against equally resourceful orchestration. The affecting elaborations of clarinet and flute in the final vision were added in 1924 after early performances, Prokofiev told Myaskovsky, ‘because without some sort of divertissement like that it sounded dreadfully like the overture [Wagner’s Prelude] to Lohengrin’.

Very little in his infernal opera of the 1920s The Fiery Angel could be accused of the Lohengrin touch. As the old Russian proverb runs, ‘you can’t drive straight on a twisting lane’, and it was not Prokofiev’s fault if few of his operas had an easy journey from completion to realisation. The Fiery Angel fared worse than most. This evil-smelling brew, which occupied him for much of the iconoclastic 1920s, stood little chance of being tolerated in Soviet Russia – especially since its source was a thorny, densely-written novel of demonic possession by the ‘decadent’ Russian symbolist writer Valery Bryusov.

In the west, The Fiery Angel was only tentatively established in the months and years after the composer’s death in 1953, with a concert performance in Paris and a production in

Venice two years later. Bruno Walter cancelled plans for the first performance in the Berlin State Opera’s 1927-28 season on the grounds that the parts were received too late, but as Prokofiev angrily pointed out, he could have re-scheduled it; more likely the soberminded Walter was scared off either by the devilish subject-matter or by the vocal and dramatic difficulties. In the meantime, the ever-supportive Serge Koussevitzky included a sequence from the opera in one of his Paris concerts in June 1928 and Prokofiev went about salvaging what material he could in what was to have been a suite but developed into a symphony.

Perhaps to please the Soviet authorities in his 1941 autobiography, Prokofiev disassociated the symphony’s subject matter from its suspect operatic source. Several of its themes originated in 1918 sketches for a string quartet and are purely diatonic in character (in other words, they could be played on the white notes of the piano). Much of the spine-tingling fascination of The Fiery Angel, however, comes from the way in which they are embedded in dense, malignant textures, and Prokofiev makes no attempt to free them from that context in the Symphony.

The orchestra’s symphonic supremacy in the opera gives Prokofiev the cue for his climaxes

here, though there is plenty of re-ordering.

For instance the opera’s furthest point of development, the overwhelming Act Three interlude during which the knight Ruprecht rushes off to fight the human embodiment of tormented heroine Renata’s ‘Fiery Angel’ and the diverse obsessive themes battle to the death, is also the first-movement development of the Symphony; but it is plausibly linked to the movement’s outer panels. A clamour of alarm bells introduces the frightening repeated figure of Renata’s supposed possession – we never do discover whether it is real or imagined – against the ominous brass chant used, in the name of a dubious religion, to ward it off.

The ‘white-note’ theme of Renata’s love for her ‘angel’ and the baser metal of Ruprecht’s passion, ushered in by bassoon, follow in passionate suit. Their lightly scored return after the central thrash is spellbinding: the first newly innocent and vulnerable (from the opera’s last act, where Renata begins to seem more sinned against than sinning), the other softly ensnared in the possession-music before the theme of Ruprecht as knight – so virile in the development, so drained now – sinks to the depths on contrabassoon.

The central movements fit together well.

The Andante hovers in uneasy anticipation of things to come. Its Russian-sounding opening on muted lower strings is a rare moment of

cloistered calm in the opera, where the heroine seems to have found peace in a monastery; there, as here, it soon becomes clouded with ominous rhythms in the bass and weird violin glissandi. Then comes that answer in the Allegro agitato: a whirlwind of devilish activity that collapses in a meandering heap of skeetering strings, divided into thirteen parts. Only a firm incantation, based on the Symphony’s opening music of possession, can bring it to a halt; a warmer pause for reflection, drawn from Renata’s warped hymn of love for the wounded Ruprecht in Act Three, is soon disturbed by supernatural knockings, which now accompany the slithery return of the scherzo proper. The final, dissonant turn of the screw comes from the brass; it is also the ending of the opera.

After that, it might have been difficult for Prokofiev to know where to turn. The Third Symphony’s solution lies in the noisiest cabbalistic invocation of the opera, the Act Two interlude that prefaces Ruprecht’s interview with a disingenuous necromancer and which also returns briefly at the climax of Act Five.

Prokofiev contents himself with a central interlude of further anticipation and rancid atmosphere; yet for all its brevity, the finale of the Third Symphony keeps us in thrall, hairraising to the last.

Programme notes © David Nice

ALEXANDER LAZAREV conductor Alexander Lazarev is one of Russia’s foremost conductors.

He studied with Leo Ginsbourg at the Moscow Conservatory and in 1971 won first prize in the Soviet Union’s national competition for conductors. The following year he went on to win first prize and gold medal at the Karajan Competition in Berlin.

From 1987 to 1995 Lazarev was Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Bolshoi Theatre, the first person for over thirty years to hold both positions concurrently.

His leadership marked a period of intensive activity with the Bolshoi Opera undertaking an unprecedented programme of prestigious foreign tours including Tokyo (1989), La Scala, Milan (1989), the Edinburgh Festival (1990 and 1991) and the Metropolitan Opera in New York (1991). Several of the Theatre’s most successful productions including Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, Tchaikovsky’s The Maid of Orleans and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mlada were recorded for DVD. From 1992 to 1995 he was Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra,

and from 1997 to 2005 Principal Conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra where his conducting of the complete cycle of Shostakovich symphonies was a high point of his tenure. From 2008 – 2016 he was Principal Conductor of the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra and now holds the position of Conductor Laureate. With them he has recorded complete cycles of the symphonies of Prokofiev, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich.

Other orchestras he has conducted include the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw, Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Orchestre National de France, NHK Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Philharmonia and London Philharmonic orchestras, and he has appeared with opera companies such as the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Arena di Verona, Opéra Bastille, Grand Théâtre de Genève, Bavarian State Opera and Netherlands Opera.

VADIM REPIN violin

© Gela Megrelidze

Siberian-born Vadim Repin won the Wienawski Competition’s gold medal and gave debuts in Moscow and St Petersburg at age 11, followed by Tokyo, Munich, Berlin, Helsinki and Carnegie Hall. At only 17 he was the youngest ever winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition. Since then he has performed with the world’s greatest orchestras and conductors.

Among the highlights of his career in the past few seasons have been tours with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev, the NHK Orchestra and Dutoit; a tour of Australia with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski, and acclaimed premières in London, Philadelphia, New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Salle Pleyel in Paris and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw of the violin concerto written for him by Sir James MacMillan, culminating in a BBC Prom at the Royal Albert Hall.

Vadim Repin recorded concerti by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky on Warner Classics, Beethoven and Brahms on Deutsche Grammophon, trios with Mischa Maisky and Lang Lang (winning the Echo Classic) and

sonatas with Nikolai Lugansky, winning the BBC Music Award. His partnership with the Bolshoi and La Scala prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova in their ‘Pas de Deux’ programme has been internationally acclaimed for its remarkable combination of music and dance.

In 2010 he received the Victoire d’Honneur, France’s most prestigious musical award for a lifetime’s dedication to music, and became Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres. In 2014 he became Honorary Professor at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music, and in 2015 at the Shanghai Conservatory, in recognition of his work with young musicians. His acclaimed Transsiberian Arts Festival has annually since 2014 brought exceptional music to his home region, including new commissions from Lera Auerbach, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Sofia Gubaidulina, and has reached out to Israel, Korea, the USA, Japan and other destinations.

He plays on the 1733 Stradivarius ‘Rode’ violin.

SIMON CALLOW narrator Simon Callow is an actor, author and director.

He studied at Queen’s University, Belfast, and then trained as an actor at the Drama Centre in London. He joined the National Theatre in 1979, where he created the role of Mozart in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus.

His many one-man shows include The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Being Shakespeare, A Christmas Carol, Inside Wagner’s Head, Juvenalia, The Man Jesus and Tuesday at Tesco’s.

He has appeared in many films including A Room with a View, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, Phantom of the Opera, The Man Who Invented Christmas and Victoria & Abdul.

He directed Shirley Valentine in the West End and on Broadway, Single Spies at the NT and Carmen Jones at the Old Vic, as well as the film of The Ballad of the Sad Café.

He has written biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton and Charles Dickens, and three autobiographical books: Being An Actor, Love Is Where It Falls, and My Life in Pieces.

The third volume of his massive Orson Welles biography, One Man Band, appeared in 2016; Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will, a short biography of Wagner, was published last year.

Music is his great passion, and he has made many appearances with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Mozart Players.

LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA The London Philharmonic Orchestra is one of the world’s finest orchestras, balancing a long and distinguished history with its presentday position as one of the most dynamic and forward-looking ensembles in the UK. This reputation has been secured by the Orchestra’s performances in the concert hall and opera house, its many award-winning recordings, trail-blazing international tours and wideranging educational work.

Founded by Sir Thomas Beecham in 1932, the Orchestra has since been headed by many of the world’s greatest conductors, including Sir Adrian Boult, Bernard Haitink, Sir Georg Solti, Klaus Tennstedt and Kurt Masur.

Vladimir Jurowski was appointed the Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor in March 2003, and became Principal Conductor in September 2007.

The Orchestra is based at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London, where it has been Resident Orchestra since 1992, giving around 30 concerts a season. Each summer it takes up its annual residency at Glyndebourne Festival Opera where it has been Resident Symphony Orchestra for over 50 years. The Orchestra performs at venues around the UK and has made numerous international tours, performing to sell-out audiences in America, Europe, Asia and Australasia.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra made its first recordings on 10 October 1932, just three days after its first public performance. It has recorded and broadcast regularly ever since, and in 2005 established its own record label.

These recordings are taken mainly from live concerts given by conductors including LPO Principal Conductors from Beecham and Boult, through Haitink, Solti and Tennstedt, to Masur and Jurowski. lpo.org.uk

© Benjamin Ealovega / Drew Kelley

SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953)

CD1 55:49

20:42

Violin Concerto No. 1 in D

01 02 03

08:56 03:29 08:17

I. Andantino II. Scherzo: Vivacissimo III. Moderato

35:07

Symphony No. 3 in C minor

04 05 06 07

13:31 06:41 08:12 06:43

I. Moderato II. Andante III. Allegro agitato IV. Andante mosso - Allegro moderato

CD2 60:41

49:52

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11

10:09 Scene I: The Buffoon and his Wife 02:21 Entr’acte I 06:20 Scene II: The Seven Buffoons 02:40 Entr’acte II 04:19 Scene III: The Buffoon’s Courtyard 01:50 Entr’acte III 06:07 Scene IV: The Buffoon’s Sitting Room 03:05 Entr’acte IV 05:30 Scene V: The Merchant’s Bedroom 01:02 Entr’acte V 06:29 Scene VI: The Merchant’s Garden

12 10:49

Chout (The Buffoon)

Rêves (Dreams)

ALEXANDER LAZAREV conductor VADIM REPIN violin SIMON CALLOW narrator LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Joakim Svenheden leader ecorded live at Southbank Centre’s R ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL, London LPO – 0107