Download or read book Sergei Prokofiev A Biography written by Harlow Robinson and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography traces the career of one of the most significant — and most popular — composers of the twentieth century. Using materials from previously closed archives in the USSR, from archives in Paris and London, and interviews with family members and musicians who knew and worked with Prokofiev, the biography illuminates the life and music of the prolific creator of such classics as Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, the “Classical” Symphony, the Alexander NevskyCantata, and the Lieutenant Kizhe Suite. Prokofiev (1891-1953) lived a life complicated and enriched by the momentous political and social transformation of his homeland in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Born to a middle-class family in rural Ukraine, he demonstrated amazing music talent at a very early age. In 1904, he began serious musical study at St. Petersburg Conservatory. For graduation, he composed (and performed) his audacious Piano Concerto No.1, which helped to make his name as the “Bad Boy of Russian Music.” As one of the most accomplished pianists of his time, Prokofiev composed many works for the instrument which remain today an important fixture of the concert repertory. Prokofiev fled the chaos following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution for the United States, where he lived and worked for several years, producing his comic opera The Love for Three Oranges and his very popular Third Piano Concerto. But he found American taste too underdeveloped, and moved to Paris in 1923 where he collaborated on ballets with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (including Prodigal Son) and wrote several more operas (The Gambler, The Fiery Angel). Prokofiev also toured widely as a concert pianist, reaching nearly all major European capitals and returning several times to the United States, where his music was promoted by Serge Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. During his Paris years, he began returning regularly on tours to the USSR, greeted with ecstatic enthusiasm. Dissatisfied with his music’s reception in Paris, and homesick for Russia, Prokofiev in 1936 made the controversial decision to move with his wife and two sons to Moscow, just as Josef Stalin’s purges were intensifying. Until 1938 he continued to tour abroad. In Moscow and Leningrad, Prokofiev worked with brilliant artists, including film director Sergei Eisenstein (for whom he wrote the scores toAlexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible), pianist Sviatoslav Richter, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and ballerina Galina Ulanova (who danced the role of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet). But life was difficult: during World War II, Prokofiev and his second wife were evacuated to Central Asia. Even so, he managed to compose his gigantic opera War and Peace, his epic Fifth Symphony and many other seminal works of Soviet and world music. After suffering a stroke in 1945, Prokofiev’s health worsened. At the same time, his music was attacked as “formalist” by Stalin’s cultural officials in 1948, when his first wife was arrested and sent to a labor camp. Ironically, Prokofiev died on the very same day as Stalin, March 5, 1953. “One is grateful for Harlow Robinson’s Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography... which is about as good as a musical biography gets: Robinson illuminates the artist’s character, penetrates the human significance of the music, demonstrates an easy command of Russian political and cultural history, and writes with clarity and vigor. Anyone thinking about Prokofiev is deeply in his debt.” — Algis Valiunas, The Weekly Standard “Harlow Robinson’s biography of the composer is the fullest account to date, a thoughtful study of a puzzling personality in and out of music and a comprehensive history of the East-West cultural curtain as it constrained the life and work of the one major artist who had been active on both of its sides... The biographer is fair-minded, generous to Prokofiev but by no means an apologist... the best-written biography of a modern composer.” — Robert Craft, The Washington Post “An indefatigably productive composer who achieved considerable success during his lifetime, Prokofiev seldom seemed satisfied, as he restlessly sought ever-greater recognition. Mr. Robinson explores the darkest corners of this labyrinthine life and brings clarity to some of its more puzzling twists and turns... [he] skillfully relates Prokofiev’s life to greater political and cultural currents.” — Carol J. Oja, The New York Times “[Robinson] tells us more than anyone hitherto about the composer’s life as well as much about the origins and qualities of the music... The first full biography published in English to avoid the pitfalls of cold-war politics... [A] book of many virtues. [Robinson] gives us more facts about Prokofiev’s life than any previous biographer, and he weaves them into a story of politics, art, and romance that marvelously gathers momentum... Robinson writes with the skill of a novelist; but the story, in this instance, is true.” — George Martin, The Opera Quarterly “A splendid life, by a Slavic-studies specialist who is also a musician, of one of our century’s most popular composers... Mr. Robinson’s account of the musical development of his monomaniacal hero is first-rate.” — The New Yorker “[A] well-written, scholarly, and very detailed book...” — April FitzLyon, The Times Literary Supplement “Certainly, there is nothing in English to rival Robinson’s book in scope and detail...” — Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe “[Prokofiev] has long been in need of the full, impressively researched, congenially written study that Robinson gives us.” — Gary Schmidgall, Opera News “[A] fluent, readable and detailed biography of Prokofiev from the perspective of a musically informed cultural historian... Robinson has made a complicated and contradictory life accessible to the western reader... Robinson has performed the important first step of chronicling for the general reader one of the twentieth century’s major musical personalities – and his biography will stitch music into the Russian cultural scene for many professional Slavists as well.” — Caryl Emerson, The Russian Review “The manner in which [Stravinsky and Prokofiev] pursued their careers in tandem for a while is one of the subjects generously described by Harlow Robinson with his flair for interesting and relevant information in his absorbing new biography of Prokofiev.” — Arthur Berger, The New York Review of Books “More detailed and comprehensive, and less politically partisan, than previous biographies, this readable account... deals objectively but compassionately with the life and work of a major Russian composer.” — Publishers Weekly “This is the best biography in English to date on Prokofiev... Robinson candidly exposes Prokofiev’s flaws, from his musical capriciousness and opportunism to his unpardonable social tactlessness... Throughout, the writing is intended for the lay reader — crisp, fast-paced, and unencumbered by technical jargon. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal
Download or read book Prokofiev by Prokofiev written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by Doubleday Books. This book was released on 1979 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpts from Prokofiev's diaries, letters, and early compositions are contained in the world-famous Russian composer's account of his childhood in the Ukraine and musical training at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.
Download or read book The Music of Sergei Prokofiev written by Neil Minturn and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a comprehensive analytical study of the music of Sergei Prokofiev. Neil Minturn sets the Russian composer's work in historical, cultural, and autobiographical context and examines a representative sampling of his compositions from a theoretical point of view.
Download or read book Prokofiev s Piano Sonatas written by Boris Berman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boris Berman draws on his intimate knowledge of Prokofiev's work to guide music lovers and pianists through the composer's nine piano sonatas.
Download or read book Sergei Prokofiev s Peter and the Wolf written by Sergei Prokofiev and published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2011-01-05 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THERE IS NO better way to introduce children to classical music than with Prokofiev’s musical fairy tale of the little boy who, with the help of a bird, outsmarted the big, bad wolf. A new retelling by Janet Schulman follows the basic story, but with a kinder ending for both the big, bad wolf and the argumentative duck. Peter Malone’s paintings have the luminous quality of old Russian masters.
Download or read book Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1998 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects for the first time in English the most representative and enlightening of Prokofiev's letters, including some previously suppressed missives that have never before been published. Expertly translated and annotated by Harlow Robinson, the correspondence presented here covers Prokofiev's earliest years at St. Petersburg Conservatory, his extensive worldwide travels, and his return to Moscow. Among the correspondents are childhood friend Vera Alpers, harpist Eleonora Damskaya, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, theatrical director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Soviet critic Boris Asafiev, composers Vernon Duke and Nikolai Miaskovsky, soprano Nina Koshetz, musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky, violinist Jascha Heifetz, conductor Serge Koussevitsky, and film director Sergei Eisenstein. Prokofiev vividly describes, often with dramatic flair and a quirky sense of humor, concerts, performances, his compositions, political events, and meetings with other musicians and composers. His observations are peppered with musical gossip as well as eccentric, original, and disarmingly apolitical insights.
Download or read book Sergey Prokofiev and His World written by Simon Alexander Morrison and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-24 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Look after your son's talents" : The literary notebook of Mariya Prokofieva / introductory essay, commentary, and translation by Pamela Davidson -- The Krzhizhanovsky-Prokofiev collaboration on "Eugene Onegin", 1936 (a lesser-known casualty of the Pushkin death jubilee) / introductory essay, commentary, and translation by Caryl Emerson -- Prokofiev and Atovmyan : Correspondence, 1933-1952 / introduction and commentary by Nelly Kravetz ; translation by Simon Morrison -- Prokofiev's immortalization / Leonid Maximenkov -- "I came too soon" : Prokofiev's early career in America / Stephen D. Press -- Lieutenant Kizhe : New media, new means / Kevin Bartig -- Observations on Prokofiev's sketchbooks / Mark Aranovsky ; translation by Jason Strudler -- Prokofiev on the Los Angeles Limited / Elizabeth Bergman -- Between two aesthetics : The revision of Pilnyak's "Mahogany" and Prokofiev's Fourth symphony / Marina Frolova-Walker -- After Prokofiev / Peter J. Schmelz -- Beyond death and evil : Prokofiev's spirituality and Christian Science / Leon Botstein.
Download or read book Sergey Prokofiev written by Daniel Jaffé and published by Phaidon. This book was released on 1998-11-06 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, revealing biography of the versatile Russian composer and pianist.
Download or read book The People s Artist written by Simon Morrison and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-25 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sergey Prokofiev was one of the twentieth century's greatest composers--and one of its greatest mysteries. Until now. In The People's Artist, Simon Morrison draws on groundbreaking research to illuminate the life of this major composer, deftly analyzing Prokofiev's music in light of new archival discoveries. Indeed, Morrison was the first scholar to gain access to the composer's sealed files in the Russian State Archives, where he uncovered a wealth of previously unknown scores, writings, correspondence, and unopened journals and diaries. The story he found in these documents is one of lofty hopes and disillusionment, of personal and creative upheavals. Morrison shows that Prokofiev seemed to thrive on uncertainty during his Paris years, stashing scores in suitcases, and ultimately stunning his fellow emigrés by returning to Stalin's Russia. At first, Stalin's regime treated him as a celebrity, but Morrison details how the bureaucratic machine ground him down with corrections and censorship (forcing rewrites of such major works as Romeo and Juliet), until it finally censured him in 1948, ending his career and breaking his health.
Download or read book The Operas of Sergei Prokofiev written by Christina Guillaumier and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The operas of Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) mark a significant contribution to twentieth-century music and theatre. Opera was Prokofiev's preferred genre; not counting juvenile and unfinished works, he wrote a total of eight. Yet, to date, little has been published about the context, rationale or musical and compositional processes behind this output. While systematic studies of Prokofiev's symphonies and his ballets exist, the operas have come under no such scrutiny. This book is the first in the English language to engage with the composer's operatic output in its entirety and provides a contextual, critical and musico-analytical account of all of Prokofiev's operas, including those juvenile works that are unpublished as well as the incomplete works composed towards the end of his life. It also includes synopses of the operas. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and other sources, the book provides the compelling untold story of Prokofiev the opera composer. CHRISTINA GUILLAUMIER is a music historian, pianist and writer on music. She is currently Head of Undergraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music in London.
Download or read book Lina Serge written by Simon Morrison and published by HMH. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account of the renowned composer’s neglected wife—including her years in a Soviet prison—is “a story both riveting and wrenching” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Serge Prokofiev was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant composers yet is an enigma to historians and his fans. Why did he leave the West and move to the Soviet Union despite Stalin’s crimes? Why did his astonishing creativity in the 1930s soon dissolve into a far less inspiring output in his later years? The answers can finally be revealed, thanks to Simon Morrison’s unique and unfettered access to the family’s voluminous papers and his ability to reconstruct the tragic, riveting life of the composer’s wife, Lina. Morrison’s portrait of the marriage of Lina and Serge Prokofiev is the story of a remarkable woman who fought for survival in the face of unbearable betrayal and despair and of the irresistibly talented but heartlessly self-absorbed musician she married. Born to a Spanish father and Russian mother in Madrid at the end of the nineteenth century and raised in Brooklyn, Lina fell in love with a rising-star composer—and defied convention to be with him, courting public censure. She devoted her life to Serge and art, training to be an operatic soprano and following her brilliant husband to Stalin’s Russia. Just as Serge found initial acclaim—before becoming constricted by the harsh doctrine of socialist-realist music—Lina was at first accepted and later scorned, ending her singing career. Serge abandoned her and took up with another woman. Finally, Lina was arrested and shipped off to the gulag in 1948. She would be held in captivity for eight awful years. Meanwhile, Serge found himself the tool of an evil regime to which he was forced to accommodate himself. The contrast between Lina and Serge is one of strength and perseverance versus utter self-absorption, a remarkable human drama that draws on the forces of art, sacrifice, and the struggle against oppression. Readers will never forget the tragic drama of Lina’s life, and never listen to Serge’s music in quite the same way again.
Download or read book Prokofiev written by David Nice and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book follows Prokofiev's personal and musical journey from his childhood on a Ukrainian country estate to the years he spent travelling in America and Europe as an acclaimed interpreter of his own works. Nice sheds new light on the striking compositions of Prokofiev's early years, his training at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and the circumstances of his departure from Russia in 1918 for what the composer thought would be a short tour of America.
Download or read book Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1907 1914 written by Sergei Prokofiev and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1907-1914: Prodigious Youthis an inexhaustibly rich portrait of one of the most vibrantperiods in the whole of Western Art,indispensable for all lovers of Prokofiev.
Download or read book Rethinking Prokofiev written by Rita McAllister and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among major 20th-century composers whose music is poorly understood, Sergei Prokofiev stands out conspicuously. The turbulent times in which Prokofiev lived and the chronology of his travels-he left Russia in the wake of Revolution, and returned at the height of the Stalinist purges-have caused unusually polarized appraisals of his music. While individual, distinctive, and instantly recognizable, Prokofiev's music was also idiosyncratically tonal in an age when tonality was largely passé. Prokofiev's output therefore has been largely elusive and difficult to assess against contemporary trends. More than sixty years after the composer's death, editors Rita McAllister and Christina Guillaumier offer Rethinking Prokofiev as an assessment that redresses this enigmatic composer's legacy. Often more political than artistic, these appraisals have depended not only upon the date of publication but also the geographical location of the writer. Commissioned from some of the most distinguished and rising scholars in the field, this collection highlights the background and context of Prokofiev's work. Contributors delve into the composer's relationship to nineteenth-century Russian traditions, Silver-Age and Symbolist composers and poets, the culture of Paris in the 1920s and '30s, and to his later Soviet colleagues and younger contemporaries. They also investigate his reception in the West, his return to Russia, and the effect of his music on contemporary popular culture. Still, the main focus of the book is on the music itself: his early, experimental piano and vocal works, as well as his piano concertos, operas, film scores, early ballets, and late symphonies. Through an empirical examination of his characteristic harmonies, melodies, cadences, and musical gestures-and through an analysis of the newly uncovered contents of his sketch-books-contributors reveal much of what makes Prokofiev an idiosyncratic genius and his music intriguing, often dramatic, and almost always beguiling.
Download or read book Diaries 1915 1922 written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume in Prokofiev's recently uncovered diaries covers the period from 1915 to 1923 - a momentous epoch in European history, in the personal story of Prokofiev's life, and in the development of his art.
Download or read book Four orchestral works written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enthält: Classical symphony, op. 25 ; Lieutenant Kije, op. 60 ; Peter and the wolf, op. 67 ; Alexander Nevsky cantata, op. 78
Download or read book Peter and the Wolf written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Retells the orchestral fairy tale of the boy who, ignoring his grandfather's warnings, proceeds to capture a wolf.
