Here is my Sunday January 9 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday, January 7, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra Beyond the Score presentation on Prokofiev's 1944 Fifth Symphony. Repeats Sunday at 3 p.m.
CSO's "Beyond the Score": an honest look at the Prokofiev Fifth
BY ANDREW PATNER
RECOMMENDED
Repeats Sunday at 3 p.m.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s deservedly popular Beyond the Score series of multimedia presentations on single works of music shifts emphases depending upon the piece. Personal histories, unpacking of musical themes, and the context of world events all shape these audio-visual immersions. This week’s examination of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1944 Fifth Symphony takes on the form of old March of Time newsreels, in part because so much of the composer’s life (1891-1953) played out against major events of the first half of the 20th century.
Gifted art director Hillary Leben and series founder, creative director, and narrator Gerard McBurney worked together to make the hour-long presentation flow rapidly Friday afternoon. Guest conductor Sir Mark Elder and the CSO gamely present appropriate excerpts of the Fifth and related and influential works. Actors Roger Mueller as various Russian and Soviet figures and William Dick as Prokofiev himself are superb, with fine support from Kelly O’Sullivan speaking the parts of various women and pianist John Goodwin. (Elder and the CSO perform the full 45-minute symphony on its own after an intermission.)
McBurney, a Soviet music specialist with a great affection for things Russian, presents an honest portrait of Prokofiev, a politically naïve figure whose real strengths as a composer include the realm of fairy tales and story-telling. Excerpts from his Chicago-commissioned and -premiered opera, The Love for Three Oranges, such great film scores as Alexander Nevsky, and ballets including Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella and his children’s tale Peter and the Wolf both emphasize this and lay out the ingredients for the hodgepodge of the Fifth Symphony itself. We see how Prokofiev composed in blocks and bits of ideas and that his problems with orchestration were apparent all the way back in his early studies with Rimsky-Korsakov.
Prokofiev’s ignorance of the consequences of politics and war appears even more astonishing against the backdrop of newsreel clips of the February and October Russian Revolutions and the Nazi assaults on and long sieges of Soviet cities in World War II. His embrace of the optimistic messages of New York department stores and Boston-born Christian Science gave him strength if not depth and encouraged his lifelong discipline and speed at his work. But they also meant that once he foolishly returned to the Soviet Union in 1935 he remained an artistic prisoner of Stalin’s caprices until his death, on the same day as the dictator, in 1953. (No mention is made of what became of Prokofiev after the Fifth Symphony nor of the literal imprisonment of his first wife Lina from 1948 until after his death.)
Some of the condensed You Are There-type narration is confusing and confused. “1929. The Great Depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal, Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan” is meaningless, inaccurate, and misleading. Franklin Roosevelt was not elected President until 1932 and the New Deal did not begin until after he was inaugurated in March of 1933. Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan had nothing to do with the Great Depression and began a year earlier, in 1928, in any event.
But we do get a good sense of how this man’s self-absorption and love of nature (wherever he goes in the world he comments on the trees and flowers that surround him) and train and car travel led to his creation of Russian-nurtured melodies and music on his own terms.
(This edition of Beyond the Score is being recorded by the CSO for eventual full-length video streaming at cso.org.)
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