Sergey Prokofiev and His World

August 8–10, August 15–17, and October 24–25, 2008

Click here for schedule.

2008 was an amazing year for Prokofiev enthusiasts. Two of his operas, The Gambler and War and Peace, were performed at the Met. The Bard Summer Music Festival gave us a broad perspective on his career and music, including the original version of his Romeo and Juliet ballet in Mark Morris' choreography—something more than a broad perspective, actually, as I shall explain. Valery Gergiev led a mini-festival of Prokofiev's stage and film music (including the  opera, The Love for Three Oranges) at Lincoln Center with the Kirov Orchestra in November, to be followed by the complete symphonies in March '09 with the London Symphony Orchestra. Mark Morris' Romeo and Juliet will return in May, this time to be conducted by Stefan Asbury. New York audiences will have enjoyed an extraordinary opportunity to hear a vast range of his achievement within some 18 months. Whoever has attended even a part of these events will never see Prokofiev the same way again.

It is not easy to comprehend the real nature of Prokofiev's achievement. He was both prolific and versatile, and he pursued his career in a number of quite different environments. His education and early development unfolded in the mystical/aesthetic ambiance of the Russian Silver Age. He spent his middle years wandering, combining parallel careers in Paris and the United States as both a virtuoso pianist and a composer. Then he returned to Russia, now the USSR, and spent his final years struggling with official policy-makers.

Coddled by his mother and brilliant as a student, he did not develop much of a sense of modesty, and he had to cope with the disappointment of never being considered the top Russian composer, first playing second to the older Stravinsky and later to the younger Shostakovich. In his constant efforts to overcome this, he tried many different forms and genres. He could write stage works of all kinds—incidental music, opera, ballet— straightforwardly serious music like his Third Symphony and string quartets, brilliant concerti, some film music, composed in short snippets, so that it could be edited together with the film. He also had a gift for words, as his recently published diaries have shown, as well as a genuine literary sensibility, which gave his song settings and operas such power. It is perhaps in opera that he fulfilled himself most completely.

Prokofiev was sophisticated and articulate; he maintained a clear sense of purpose as a composer; and he took pains to write music that was accessible to his audiences. He should not be so mysterious as a man and artist, but he is, because of the circumstances of his life and the Protean adaptability it demanded of him, a quality which—fortunately for him—was among the stronger of his native gifts. Since he lived and worked in America for some years and left behind a reputation, Americans know one Prokofiev, and Russians know another, with occasional crossovers like the Fifth Symphony. Some of his most important Soviet works were repressed and are only now becoming known to Russians and westerners alike, for example his extraordinary Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution of 1936-37. It is not untypical that he expected to achieve great success with this ambitious work, but it had exactly the opposite effect and was not performed as written for many years. His motives for his return to the Soviet Union are still debated. They certainly had more to do with his identity as a Russian than his sympathy for Communism. His spiritual baggage oddly included Christian Science, which he learned about in Paris through his first wife, Lina, and seems to have taken very seriously. As Leon Botstein argued in his essay in the Bard essay collection, he found in it at least a partial cure for his chronic headaches, heart problems, and, with assiduous study over some years, an improvement in his interpersonal relations, especially in his feelings of resentment towards rivals. It also functioned as a moral palliative when he decided to live in Stalinist Russia.

It is surely very strange that a highly educated Russian artist like Prokofiev should become so absorbed in Mary Baker Eddy's pragmatic, characteristically American, teachings. His belief was known in the past, but it was not treated seriously until the publication of his diaries in Russian and in English, which made it impossible to ignore its importance in his personal and artistic development. It is even stranger to think of Prokofiev's mature music, which seems so very specific and concrete in its often imitative sonic palette, in the context of such an idealized concept of art and music as is found in Christian Science. The vivid character sketching and aural mimesis of Peter and the Wolf and the rich scene-painting of the Fifth Symphony are renderings of a material world, which is from the point of view of Christian Science, illusory. Presumably Prokofiev's enlightenment liberated him to develop his artistic vision of all the fleeting accidentals of matter. However, as paradoxical as it seems, Leon Botstein made a strong case for the significance of Christian Science in his essay, and the subject kept coming back during the panel discussions and symposia of the festival. Not everyone was entirely convinced.

The academic contributions were especially interesting and well-prepared this year, I thought, beginning with a wide-ranging discussion of his career by Marina Frolova-Walker, David Nice, and Harlow Robinson, all distinguished figures in Prokofiev studies. The second panel, which included Kevin Bartig, Caryl Emerson, and Joan Neuberger, focused on his stage and film music, a probing investigation of some of Prokofiev's more obscure, even abortive, collaborative projects, as well as his score for Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, which many consider the greatest film score ever written. The symposium dealt with Stalin and Stalinists. The third panel, Leon Botstein, Simon Morrison and Maya Pritsker, explored religion, spirituality, and music, not so much Prokofiev's later involvement in Christian Science as his contact with Theosophy and the other spiritual movements which flourished between 1890 and the outbreak of the first world war in Russia. Scriabin was a powerful early influence on Prokofiev, and we heard Prokofiev's astonishing setting of They Are Seven by the mystic poet, Bal'mont, in the final concert. Nonetheless the panelists tended to believe that Prokofiev never himself became too deeply involved in these occult movements. In late October the third weekend offered a final panel discussion on art and dictatorship with Leon Botstein, Jennifer Day, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Simon Morrison.

The concerts, carefully "curated" by Leon Botstein, Christopher Gibbs, and Robert Martin with Scholar-in-Residence, Simon Morrison, seemed like musical symposia in their own right, revealing aspects of Prokofiev's work known only to specialists, as well as equally obscure works by important teachers and contemporaries—among them Tcherepnin, Glière, Glazunov, Scriabin, Achron, Lyadov, John Alden Carpenter, Feinberg, Myaskovsky, and Shcherbachyov, in addition to a more familiar Parisian crew. There was a great deal of interesting and appealing music on these programs, but the truly amazing discoveries were among Prokofiev's own works. I don't believe there is another major composer with so many important and compelling forgotten works in his catalogue. As I observed at the beginning, there are quite a few treasures hiding in the shadows of Prokofiev's blockbusters, and they are so diverse that it isn't easy to see where to begin.

Perhaps it's best to enter Prokofiev's world through the front door, starting with the final concert of the third weekend, which included the familiar Fifth Symphony. (André Previn had conducted it at Tanglewood in August.) Since this third weekend coincides with Bard's parents' weekend, it usually leans in the direction of accessibility and even a touch of showiness. It began with the popular march from the Love for Three Oranges, venturing into the unfamiliar only in the Waltz Suite, Opus ) and John Alden Carpenter's Violin Concerto (1937), eloquently played by Mira Wang. The Waltz Suite combines waltzes from War and Peace, Lermontov, and Cinderella, all re-orchestrated for the heavy taste of the Stalinist era. None of these works were among the composer's better known, either in his own lifetime or after, but they form a retrospective of his intensely characterized, sometimes acerbic, sometimes morbid essays in the genre. As the evening progressed, I could not suppress an ironic interior smile. The effect of the program was without a doubt that of a sonic spectacular in the best rumbustious tradition, but Mr. Botstein's readings were marvellously controlled, even sober, in the care with which he brought out Prokofiev's inner lines and his complex, ever-shifting web of textures and colors. The American Symphony Orchestra played with discipline and enthusiasm. The lower strings and winds were clear, with a rich leathery color and impressive power, the middle range was lean and transparent, and the upper registers, especially the extreme high octaves, were brilliant and fiery, but detail always came through. So often, even with the BSO at its usual venues, these timbres often blend into an indistinguishable white blaze. It was a terrific pleasure to hear the entire gamut of sound so clearly, thanks to the hall's acoustics, the ASO's playing, and Mr. Botstein's respect for the score. Although the Carpenter concerto was certainly an interesting piece, worth hearing a second time, wavering oddly between lyricism and exuberance, the symphony was the climax of the concert. Botstein began with a steady pulse he maintained in different meters throughout the work. As large a gesture as it is, it came across as fundamentally classical—a pendant to the Symphony No. 1, the "Classical," we heard in the first orchestral concert back in August—as if Prokofiev had found a brilliant solution to the prescriptions of Soviet art and were reveling in it as a platform for his gifts of characterization and scene-painting. The maestro shared the composer's inventive delight in winds and percussion, evoking the mechanical effects so fashionable in the 1920's. Pizzicato and contrapuntal passages for strings transparent, balance, and full of bite and color. After our long and sometimes strange journey through Prokofiev's career, it was a pleasure to meet his familiar face again, realized with such intelligence and sonic acuity.

Prokofiev's Fifth and First Symphonies bookended the Bard Festival with an assertion of Prokofiev's classical strain—without suggesting that this was the dominant direction among his multifarious artistic goals.  Members of the ASO under Leon Botstein's direction played the "Classical" symphony with energy and attractive balance in a focused, but genial and relaxed performance, a trifle messy here and there in the final movement, nothing like the exercise in precision it has been in other hands. This only reflected the pleasure the musicians obviously felt in playing it. As if to stress the symmetry of the festival's organization, the concert began with the March from the Love for Three Oranges in its piano arrangement, played with earthy flair and intelligence by Jeremy Denk.

This first program revealed a good deal of Prokofiev's range in chamber and solo music, leaning somewhat toward his more serious and rigorous modalities in the first half. His first string quartet (1930) is a dark, concentrated work in B minor, interspersed with flowing sections in lighter textures. The third and final movement, an Andante, contains some warmer moods, expressive passages for viola and cello. The Chiara String Quartet gave it a concentrated reading which did justice to all its shifting moods and colors. Irina Mishura, accompanied by Julia Silberquit, showed a marvellously colorful and generous voice, bright on top, rich on the bottom, in her moving performance of the Five Poems by Anna Akhmatova (1916). The Seventh Piano Sonata (1939-42) is another substantial, many-sided work, brilliantly played by Michael Abramovich. Lighter music came after the break. Jeremy Denk played the early, somewhat Lisztian Suggestion Diabolique of 1908, baritone John Hancock sang two songs from Lieutenant Kizhe with a great range of nuance and occasionally almost superhuman size. Soovin Kim, violin, and Jeremy Denk gave an elegant reading of the Five Melodies of 1925 with a mellow tone and a fine sense of its flow and arching lines. Mr. Kim's phrasing was occasionally so natural that it seemed more like a conversation than a performance. The Overture on Hebrew Themes (1919, orch. 1934) arose from Prokofiev's amusement that many people he met during his American sojourn took him for a Jew. This work for small orchestra and piano, played by Julia Silberquit, sounded like a parody of Mahler at times, making me wonder why no one got the idea earlier. If Wagner was fair game for Fauré, Mahler surely deserves a roasting as well. In any case the overture did not impress me as one of Prokofiev's stronger works.

The second program, Before Emigration: Teachers and Influences, is self-explanatory. It included music by the leading figures of Prokofiev's youth: Sergey Taneyev, Nicolai Tcherepnin, Reinhold Glière, Nicolai Medtner, Aleksander Glazunov, Stravinsky, and of course Prokofiev himself. The Bard Festival's performers are an encyclopedia of the most highly developed and intelligent younger musicians in the New York area and elsewhere. Much of this music is rare heard today, and these thoroughly prepared performances by these adventurous, brilliant musicians made sure they would make a vivid impression and stay with us. Ieva Jocubavaciute, Sophie Shao, Jeremy Denk, and Michael Abramovich have all been fixtures for some years, and, as usual, they brought virtuosity, concentration, and understanding to the repertory. Denk brilliantly encompassed the vast range of character, mood, and demanding technique in Prokofiev's early collection of short piano impressions, Visions Fugitives (1915-17), which belongs in the heady Silver Age milieu of Semero Ikh, and Michael Abramovich's performance of Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka could stand beside the very best, Brendel and Pollini included. Glazunov's String Quintet in A Major (1891-92) carried us back to the world of Brahms and Dvorak, while Tcherepnin's unique Six Quartets for Four Horns of 1910, justly fascinated the audience with its unusual outdoorsy sonorities and Dvořákian tunefullness, as they were warmly and impeccably played by Julia Pilant, David Smith, Chad Yarborough, and Kyle Hoyt. Prokofiev's Two Poems (1910-11), splendidly sung by Dina Kuznetsova, provided a necessary Symbolist presence.

The evening's orchestral concert, The Silver Age: Mystic Symbols, included other important members of the older generation, above all Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin, but also Joseph Achron and Anatoly Lyadov, and continued to explore Russian Symbolism in music and literature. Prokofiev's teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, kept his wits about him, but otherwise the young composer's years of study and early development were saturated with the overwhelming mystical atmosphere of the Silver Age. He never seems to have become deeply involved in the principle tendencies of this movement as realized in the spiritualistic extremes of Scriabin and his all-excluding devotion to art for art's sake, but he participated in it nonetheless, and his relation to it did not truly reach a peak and bring about an internal reaction until the late 1920's, when his studies in Christian Science led him to repudiate his opera after Bryusov's novel, The Fiery Angel, and recast some of its music as his Third Symphony. In this concert Rimsky-Korsakov and Lyadov, with whom Prokofiev also studied, represent the folkloric interests of the less mystically inclined composers, which nonetheless manifest themselves in dreamy, atmospheric evocations of traditional Russian motifs. The tone poem Sadko actually follows a narrative, the story of an Orpheus-like bard who is drawn down to the bottom of the sea by the Sea-King and must play his harp to win the King's daughter. Lyadov's Enchanted Lake is more of an evocation of a vision. This brief miniature is Wagnerian to the core, with patent reminiscences of Tristan and the "Forest Murmurs" in Siegfried. Two brief works effectively summed up the mystical excursions of Scriabin and his influence, the familiar Poème d'Extase, and the extremely obscure Epitaph, to the Memory of Aleksandr Scriabin by the little-known Jewish composer Joseph Achron, in which he expressed his emotions at the death of his hero, which was considered an intentional departure by fellow theosophists. This was in fact quite an effective work, one which stood fairly solidly beside Scriabin's wild tone poem. Leon Botstein led the ASO in clearly defined, but richly textured performances. It was a joy to hear this repertory in the Sosnoff acoustics, in which Mr. Botstein can bring out the inner textures of a score with little effort. If I were to express a reservation, it was only that the treatment of Scriabin's Poème was somewhat tame and earth-bound, as salubriously lucid as it was.

In this context, Prokofiev's First Piano Concerto (1911-12), sounded bold and forward-looking, containing many of the modernistic elements which dominated his mature music. Even at that early date, Prokofiev's brilliant pianism and his use of ostinato and angular phrases enabled him to distance himself from lush effusions of the period. In it the incisive rendition of the orchestral parts was spot on, while Blair McMillen's playing was astonishing in its hairpin shifts of dynamics, mood and color. There was impressive virtuosity, insight, and energy in his performance, as well as detachment of a fussy, postmodern sort, which I found rather off-putting. Nonetheless, the concerto made clear just how independent and genuinely original the young Prokofiev was. On the other hand, if anyone should doubt that the Third Symphony is one of Prokofiev's truly great works, Botstein and the ASO made an incontrovertible case for it. It covers a vast and intense emotional range, but it is economically and rigorously constructed. Botstein's fine perception of the details of the score and the orchestra's responsiveness made this one of the high points of the festival. While the First Piano Concerto shows a worldly, terse, and stylish approach to composition which aggressively rejects the Schwärmerei of Scriabin and his like, Prokofiev assimilated enough of these turn-of-the-century ideas that they establish a powerful stream in his creativity, which he had to work through in the Fiery Angel, and eventually, through Christian Science, out of his life. At that point, it seems, he was ready to embrace the aesthetic principles of the Stalin's artistic bureaucrats.

On Sunday, August 10, there followed two concerts I was unable to attend, a many-sided survey of the most prominent composers in Paris during Prokofiev's period of activity in the city, and The Cult of the Child. The delectable collation of light salon pieces in the morning concert evoked the flavor of the Parisian environment in which Prokofiev circulated for a few years in the 1920's. There were more ambitious projects gestating not only for Prokofiev, but for Stravinsky, Honegger, Ravel, and Stravinsky, among others, but the light tone of the works included in the concert reflects one of the prime gestures of modernism, the anti-Wagnerian slimming-down already apparent in the First Piano Concerto, which ultimately leads to the classicism of the First Symphony and much of Stravinsky's work of the period. One can read about this in any number of music history textbooks, but in a program like this one can experience it—a prime example of how the Bard Festival, academically based as it is, goes beyond the limits of academic documentation. We are fortunate that most musicologists enjoy listening to music and find themselves able to sit in the same hall with the educated public. Neither can I write first hand about the events of Friday, August 15, when the symposium on Stalinism was held, a film about Prokofiev's diaries by Yosif Feygenberg was screened, and another concert, White Russians Abroad, took place. This program feature music with an inclination towards the liturgical, some of it well known, like Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms.

No Bard Festival would be complete without an incursion into popular music of one sort or another. Some Russian émigrés to America, most notably Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) found a place in the world of Broadway and Hollywood. The program From Broadway to Gorky Street illustrated musical theater in both new worlds, America and the Soviet Union, with music of Prokofiev and Dukelsky in the context of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Isaak Dunayevsky. On the whole the program showed the spark of life, although some of the efforts to recreate period style seemed a trifle pedantic. Baritone Jonathan Hays, on the other hand, showed the very best of the classically trained singer with an intuitive grasp of Broadway style.

The afternoon program which followed, The Return to the USSR, was full of revelations, not only Prokofiev's wonderful Sonata in D Major for Flute and Piano (1943), but Samuil Feinberg's tightly composed Sonata No. ), impeccably played by the Benjamin Hochman, one of the most intelligent and refined young pianists we have today. Prokofiev's Second String Quartet (1941) concluded the program, balancing Shostakovich's better-known Third String Quartet (1946) at the end of the first half. The Bard Festival Quartet was at their very best in both.

The evening program, Manufacturing a Soviet Sound: the response of Two Composer Friends, focused on the work of Prokofiev's friend, Nikolay Myaskovsky, as well as two little-known late works by Prokofiev. The two composers were not alone in having a narrow, rocky path to negotiate among the stringent requirements and watchful censorship that prevailed from the late thirties beyond their deaths. One of Prokofiev's strategies for success in the Stalin era was to write light music. He was also wont to recycle music from stage productions as orchestral suites, a formula which was just as effective in the West, as shown by the popularity Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe Suites and the Rosenkavalier Suite. Prokofiev's Summer Night Suite from The Duenna (1950) is just such a work. The two Myaskovky Symphonies, No. ) and No. ) are sufficiently well-written and concise to be listenable today, and, in order to appreciate it, we do not have to know that No. 16 was originally planned as an "Aviation Symphony." The requirements of Socialist Realism in music were somewhat ambiguous, and, we learned from Simon Morrison's introductory talk, that composers could win favor by dropping hints to critics that their forthcoming works were dedicated to some edifying subject, like collective farming or, as here, Soviet progress in aviation, without actually having to adhere to the subject in the finished work. (Actually, Myaskovsky commemorates an air disaster in its mournful third movement.) The surprise and the challenge of the evening was Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto in E Minor for Cello (1950-51, rev. 1952). This ambitious, rich-textured, occasionally turgid-sounding work evolved from a cello concerto he wrote for Piatigorsky, beginning in 1933 in Paris and not concluding until 1938 in Moscow. The work was not a success, but Prokofiev heard Rostropovich play in 1947 and formed the idea of reworking the concerto with the young cellist, then still a conservatory student. This final version was only performed after Prokofiev's death in 1954. None of them has ever become established in the repertory. For my part, I was fascinated by its density and its shifting moods and textures. My companion thought it too much of a showpiece, and there is no denying that it is something of a virtuoso vehicle. Gavriel Lipkind's performance was over-the-top in this respect, shamelessly flamboyant, but always musical and expressive. Perhaps only Rostropovich himself could have succeeded in fully humanizing this music.

The next program, Formalism, Challenge and Response, included songs from Prokofiev's late operas, Semyon Kotko and The Story of a Real Man, as well as a range of solo instrumental works. The unpublished Suite for Solo Cello, brilliantly played by Sophie Shao, is another Rostropovich collaboration, while Shostakovich's D Minor Prelude and Fugue brought him head-to-head with Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 9. Benjamin Hochman's playing of the prelude and fugue was so impressive that it left an appetite for more. However, the program included others among the Bard Festival's most distinguished regulars, and it became a pianistic feast. Frederic Chiu gave a virile reading of the sonata, and Dmitry Rachmanov joined Michael Abramovich in Vladimir Shcherbachyov's suite for piano four hands, The Thunderstorm, taken from one of his film scores. The soprano Dina Kuznetsova, sensitively accompanied by Rachmanov, did full justice to the expressivity of the Prokofiev numbers, as well as the acrobatics of Kabalevsky's Seven Merry Songs, a nursery-rhyme cycle for children.

For those who believe that the Romeo and Juliet ballet was Prokofiev's greatest work (And I heard that expressed during the Festival.), the programming may at this point seem to be venturing into increasingly obscure and dangerous territory. In the final, unforgettable concert of the summer, the music was even more unfamiliar and, indeed, strange. Nonetheless, it brought us to closer to a face to face encounter with Prokofiev. If this highly educated, disciplined, and focused artist seems elusive to us today, it is at least partly because of his wanderings in a rapidly changing world. Prokofiev matured during the First World War and grew old during the Second. His life was by no means long by contemporary western standards, but in cultural change it embraced eons. He left the rapidly crumbling Russian civilization of his youth for America and was drawn back seventeen years later by his Russianness to a society which was alien in every material and ideological aspect. In between he found himself unable to settle into either the United States or Paris. Wherever he was, he found it constantly necessary to adapt. His virtuosity as a pianist helped him to make a living in the West and to induce his somewhat unenthusiastic audiences to listen to his piano music. In the Soviet Union he achieved some of the greatest work of its kind in adapting to current musical needs like the ballet, the theater, the cinema, and the grand Stalinist symphony, but he encountered terrific struggles in the process as well. He was devoted to opera at a time when it was difficult to get operas produced. He worked for seven or more years on The Fiery Angel, an opera without a commission or any likely potential venue, which treated the occult and sexual obsession. It received a performance only some years after his death. Most interestingly, this unprofitable project bridged the transition between his youth and his maturity.

Early in his American years, when he was in Los Angeles, a friend found a copy of Bryusov's novel, The Fiery Angel, in the original Russian, in a local bookshop. He was delighted to have it, not only because he thought it a work of genuine literary merit, but because he had first learned about it a few years earlier from his friend, the theosophist and poet, Boris Nikolaevich Bashkirov, known under the nom de plume Boris Verin. In his diary, especially in the early phase of their relationship, Prokofiev showed little regard for Bashkirov's "philosophy," which he said in his diaries to be simply boring and nothing more. Nonetheless, Prokofiev saw fit to spend quite a bit of time with him, going on a lengthy trip to the Caucasus. It is apparent enough that he felt a good deal of affection for the man in spite of their differences. While Prokofiev put up a healthy resistance to theosophy and kindred movements, which were almost ubiquitous among the non-Marxist intelligentsia of the Silver Age, either he could not avoid it, or he actually entertained some openness towards these currents. One acquaintance made fun of him for his predilection for setting poems of the theosophist Bal'mont, and he read with serious attention Édouard Schuré's books about Wagner and about esoteric religion. We can study this in some detail, thanks to a notebook, now known to have been kept by his mother and not himself, which is published in the original Russian and in English translation with a full commentary by Pamela Davidson in Bard Festival essay volume.

This notebook documents the composer's interests between 1914 and the end of 1917, during which time he was reading Schuré and Schopenhauer (deriving some of the spiritual comfort and relief from insomnia and headaches Wagner himself enjoyed through reading Schopenhauer), and was in contact with Bashkirov and Bal'mont. Prokofiev decided to set Bal'mont's poem, "Semero ikh," or "Seven, they are Seven," a Russian version of recently discovered Akkadian incantation against harmful spirits. He discussed the project with the poet at length and benefitted from listening to him recite it with his own particular delivery and accentuation. He set to work on the cantata after much preliminary thought, just as he was finishing the "Classical" Symphony. In his diary he observed that he considered it a far more important work. In fact he considered this rarely heard piece to be a very important work, the fruit of his reading of Schopenhauer. Actually, as he was writing "Seven," he spent his free time reading Kant. The result, as I experienced from Leon Botstein's powerful reading, was a deeply disturbing work. Its dark energy and impetus convey the presence of some thoroughly evil and supremely powerful beings, as well as the remote  antiquity of the words and the feelings they convey. Scott Williamson sang the brutal tenor part with throat-wrenching force, but a fine heroic voice and expressive phrasing. The Bard Festival Chorale singing under James Bagwell, produced excellent, clear Russian, all-important in this work. It was first performed in Paris in 1924 under Serge Koussevitzky, who greatly admired it. In Russia it was repressed because Bal'mont, who emigrated in 1920, was considered suspect, and not performed until 1956. In his 1938 memoir Prokofiev claimed that Semero Ikh was an expression of the spirit of the Revolution, flatly contradicting the account of his diary. His reasons for the lie should be obvious enough.

The cantata was accompanied by Prokofiev's exotic and very attractive Egyptian Nights Suite, the derivative of a peculiar stage production combining scenes from Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and Pushkin's poem "Cleopatra," as well as Rachmaninoff's Three Russian Songs and Dukelsky's Epitaph, eloquently sung by Dina Kuznetsova. The next jolt, however, did not come until after the break, when Mr. Botstein concluded the evening—and the summer sessions of the Festival—with Prokofiev's Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution. One can anticipate the performance of such a work in a cynical spirit. Prokofiev wrote his share of potboilers along with the best of his fellows.  However, on listening to it, one realizes immediately that Prokofiev gave it his best. In fact it is an absolutely brilliant work, using his enormous assemblage of conventional and unconventional forces to paint a vivid picture of the Revolution and its values. Simon Morrison's program note very interestingly points out that Prokofiev first conceived the work when he was living in the south of France in 1932, before he emigrated to the Soviet Union. A French Communist neighbor of his, Jacques Sadoul, encouraged him in the project, making his French-language edition of Lenin's writings available to him. When Prokofiev visited the Soviet Union briefly in 1933 and 1934, he discussed the project with an official of the Soviet Radio. A commission came through in June, 1935, the year before he permanently took up residence in the Soviet Union. The Cantata was more than a calling-card to the Soviet artistic authorities; it was his way of coming to terms artistically with the Revolution, which had been a matter of indifference to him when it was taking place. Its reception must have come as a huge shock. His use of texts by Marx, Lenin, and especially Stalin were considered offensive by the Committee on Arts Affairs, and the work was repressed. It was not performed in the USSR until 1966, and then in a version from which the words of Stalin, then in disfavor, were cut. It remained unperformed in the West until Neeme Järvi conducted it complete in London in 1992.

Its ten movements span the advent of Communism before the Revolution and the formation of a Constitution, evoking the actual series of events, sirens, a recorded voice of Lenin, a bank of accordions, and a vast percussion section. While it adheres to an established Soviet genre, the patriotic cantata, it includes musique concrète, as well as an allusion to the fugue in the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  Its musical quality and its humanistic scope go far beyond the genre, however, giving it a life beyond the values it served. The audience was entirely overwhelmed by the power and sheer scale of the work and responded by applause that was almost as loud as the music.

The Bard Festival is all about discovery, but Prokofiev's neglected work, here revealed to most of the audience for the first time, can only transform our entire concept of the composer. His diaries, first published in Russian only a few years ago, and now appearing in English translation in a fine edition by the Cornell University Press, not only adds to that transformation of our idea of the composer, it gives us a great literary work as well. Prokofiev rightly said that if he were not a musician he would have been a writer or a poet. He did in fact write some fiction and poetry, but he has also given us one of the great artist's diaries in our culture. But now we can enjoy a transformed Prokofiev, a composer for whom Semero Ikh and the Cantata were more important than Peter and the Wolf and the "Classical" Symphony. While the excellence and importance of his piano music has always been recognized, it is impossible understand him properly through his best-known works. Beyond what we heard in the concerts, opera loomed in the background as a genre to which Prokofiev was constantly attracted. He was unfortunate in the taste of his times and in the difficulty he had in getting his work produced. While the Met has redressed the balance somewhat in their productions of The Gambler and War and Peace, others remain unknown in this country. The Fiery Angel is perhaps the greatest desideratum, but it is available in a German DVD (PAL, Region 2) in an excellent production from the Mariinsky Theater under Valery Gergiev and directed by the brilliant Australian David Freeman. In any case, I can only hope that some of the Festival's discoveries will find their way into a least a limited place in the repertory. And it's no longer so obvious to me that Stravinsky and Shostakovich were better composers.

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The author wishes to extend special thanks to Irene Zedlacher for arranging for him to have complete recordings of panel discussions and symposia he was unable to attend.