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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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In Reply to: Agreed! Prokofiev's crappiest works. Oh...wait a minute...never mind. Nt posted by jdaniel@jps.net on February 3, 2016 at 21:51:56:
The SF Symphony did it four years ago under Jurowski. I posted about it here at that time:. . . the biggest work [on the program] was Levon Atovmyan's version of Prokofiev's film music for Eisensein's "Ivan The Terrible". This was the North American première of this version, and according to the pre-concert lecture, Atovmyan actually knew Prokofiev and had discussed with the composer how this film music could be best made into a cantata along the lines of "Alexander Nevsky". Prokofiev wanted to distance himself a bit from this music, owing to the dangerous political trouble that "Ivan The Terrible - Part 2" had occasioned, so that's why the composer didn't arrange the music himself. Apparently, Atovmyan did some work on it in 1944, and then worked on it off and on from 1945-1961. In the meantime, another version of the music took hold (made by Stasevich, who had conducted the film's soundtrack), and Atovmyan's efforts were forgotten, until around 2007, when Atovmyan's daughter presented the music to an Israeli musicologist, Nelly Kravetz. This finally led to a public première of Atovmyan's version earlier this year (2012!) in London. Fascinating story!I just re-checked Amazon, and this Atovmyan version does not seem to have received a commercial recording at this time.
My feeling about earlier recordings of Ivan The Terrible (Slatkin, Muti, etc.) is that we get too piecemeal a presentation of the music - the score just seems to flit from one short section to another, without a larger overall sense (such as we do get in Alexander Nevsky). In Atovmyan's version (which is laid out in eight large sections), there is a vast improvement in the musical continuity, and I hope Jurowski records (or has recorded) this version so that we can all live with it and see how it holds up over time. One thing I'm a little uneasy about is that Atovmyan has tweaked the orchestration - and that's not something I feel comfortable with, especially with a master of it such as Prokofiev. Perhaps a little hubris in play here?
In any case, the music was very effective in this guise. And as an audiophile, I was struck by one thing in particular: the loud sections seemed to reach such a high decibel level, that the sound became too much for the hall (man, those brass and percussion sections can put out A LOT of sound) - these sections seemed to become compressed and cramped, just as one might be describing a troublesome recording. But it struck me that perhaps the trouble might NOT necessarily lie in the recording per se, but rather, in the relationship of the music to the ENVIRONMENT in which it was recorded.
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Follow Ups
- Depends on which version - did you hear the Atovmyan version four years ago? - Chris from Lafayette 23:55:00 02/03/16 (1)
- Just joking but have Muti's only. Will investigate further. nt - jdaniel@jps.net 08:16:27 02/04/16 (0)
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