The latest incredible recording in the acclaimed Jarvi/RSNO partnership!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115797 in Music
• Released on: 2009-04-27
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 66 minutes

CD Description
Neeme Järvi is universally applauded for his Prokofiev recordings. Here he conducts the first recording of Symphonic Fragments from 'The Queen of Spades', as arranged and elaborated by Michael Berkeley, coupled with the seldom performed oratorio 'On Guard for Peace'. In 1936 Prokofiev was commissioned to write the score for Mikhail Romm's film 'The Queen of Spades'. Stalin's directives put an end to the project and the film was never realised; consequently Prokofiev's score was left unheard, and in the case of some numbers unorchestrated. In 2007/ 2008 Michael Berkeley was commissioned to complete the score for a ballet at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, titled 'Rushes' and performed in 2008. This arrangement gave Prokofiev s music viable dramatic shape, though independent of the original film plot. The Symphonic Fragments recorded here return to and elaborate further upon the surviving film music material to create an extended suite for the concert hall. Berkeley describes his work as follows: 'I think the best phrase is that I have ''arranged and elaborated'' what Prokofiev wrote. It has a wonderful energy and rhythm. Yes, of course it has a film-music feel, but it also has this obsessive quality.' It is coupled here with Prokofiev's final politically motivated work, and the last of his choral compositions, the stirring oratorio 'On Guard for Peace'. Neeme Järvi conducts the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, in this their twenty-second Prokofiev recording for Chandos.

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Customer Reviews

Second-Rate Prokofiev
I've consistently praised Neeme Järvi's series of recordings of Prokofiev's orchestral music, most of it issued originally a few years ago and now being reissued on Chandos. This disc contains two works that have been newly recorded. And they are strange works indeed. During the late 1930s Prokofiev wrote three pieces based on works of Pushkin -- incidental music for a production of Pushkin's play, Boris Godunov; incidental music for a stage production of his Eugene Onegin; and music for The Queen of Spades. The latter was never finished and never produced, largely because of a change in attitudes from Stalin's government about what art works should focus on. Strangely, many years later London's Royal Ballet had the idea to use the Queen of Spades music for a ballet based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot (!). British composer Michael Berkeley was enlisted to put together a ballet suite from Prokofiev's sketches. And it is that work we hear on this CD. The music is not quite top-drawer Prokofiev. Further, there is much that is already familiar because it was recycled by Prokofiev into subsequent works. For instance, in the suite's first movement we hear a theme that he later used in his Eighth Piano Sonata, and even more obviously in the second movement we hear great chunks of music that he used virtually unchanged in the slow movement of his popular Fifth Symphony. All that aside, there is not much here to excite any but the most avid Prokofiev fans.

As for the 1950 oratorio 'On Guard for Peace', the less said the better. This is one of those god-awful patriotic oratorios that Stalin's apparatchiks ordered by the yard from the country's composers. This one extols Stalin and the Soviet state, and recalls the wonders and sacrifices of the War. It sets to music such deathless lyrics as 'The Festival of Peace in Moscow/resembles a foaming sea./Squads of young Leninists parade,/singing through the city.' The whole thing is a ponderous, bloviating mess and one wonders why Järvi and Chandos felt it needed to be recorded.

Skip this one.

Scott Morrison