The Russian invasion of Ukraine has created a cultural panic of a kind that has not been seen in generations. Several performers with strong ties to Vladimir Putin have seen their careers in Europe and America evaporate.
. Neither strategy did the music justice, but the second is the one worth emulating: by reversing the jargon of Nazi propaganda, it restored the maddening ambiguity that is music’s natural habitat.
Cosmopolitan in his outlook, Prokofiev spent time in America and France after the Bolshevik Revolution. His decision to settle in Stalinist Russia was based on a miscalculation that his fame would protect him from ideological pressures.“How Russian is it?” is a question that could be asked of both major works on the L.A. Phil’s recent program. Prokofiev was, in fact, Ukrainian, though in an anachronistic sense.
Yet Prokofiev lacked local roots: his father, an estate manager, came from Moscow. Cosmopolitan in his outlook, the composer spent time in America and France after the Bolshevik Revolution. His decision to settle in Stalinist Russia, in the thirties, was based on a miscalculation that his fame would protect him from ideological pressures. Instead, he met with repeated humiliations.
Lately, I have gone back to the recording of “Semyon Kotko” that Gergiev made with the Mariinsky Theatre ensemble in 1999—part of an invaluable series of Russian-opera recordings that appeared on the now defunct Philips label. In particular, I’ve been listening to the, which depicts the burning of a Ukrainian village. Over a relentless ostinato, a women’s chorus sings, “They plunder and burn us, / they plunder and burn.
No political questions attend the First Piano Concerto—the insolently brilliant work of a twenty-one-year-old composer who was defining himself within and against Russian traditions. Inspired in part by Richard Strauss’s youthful anti-concerto “Burleske,” Prokofiev has fun at the expense of the grand Romantic manner, even as he deploys its devices to empower the soloist .
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