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 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 Sergey Prokofiev and His World written by Simon Morrison and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sergey Prokofiev (1891-1953), arguably the most popular composer of the twentieth century, led a life of triumph and tragedy. The story of his prodigious childhood in tsarist Russia, maturation in the West, and rise and fall as a Stalinist-era composer is filled with unresolved questions. Sergey Prokofiev and His World probes beneath the surface of his career and contextualizes his contributions to music on both sides of the nascent Cold War divide. The book contains previously unknown documents from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow and the Prokofiev Estate in Paris. The literary notebook of the composer's mother, Mariya Grigoryevna, illuminates her involvement in his education and is translated in full, as are ninety-eight letters between the composer and his business partner, Levon Atovmyan. The collection also includes a translation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's unperformed stage adaptation of Eugene Onegin, for which Prokofiev composed incidental music in 1936. The essays in the book range in focus from musical sketches to Kremlin decrees. The contributors explore Prokofiev's time in America; evaluate his working methods in the mid-1930s; document the creation of his score for the film Lieutenant Kizhe; tackle how and why Prokofiev rewrote his 1930 Fourth Symphony in 1947; detail his immortalization by Soviet bureaucrats, composers, and scholars; and examine Prokofiev's interest in Christian Science and the paths it opened for his music. The contributors are Mark Aranovsky, Kevin Bartig, Elizabeth Bergman, Leon Botstein, Pamela Davidson, Caryl Emerson, Marina Frolova-Walker, Nelly Kravetz, Leonid Maximenkov, Stephen Press, and Peter Schmelz.
Download or read book American Soviet Cultural Diplomacy written by Cadra Peterson McDaniel and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere is the first full-length examination of a Soviet cultural diplomatic effort. Following the signing of an American-Soviet cultural exchange agreement in the late 1950s, Soviet officials resolved to utilize the Bolshoi Ballet’s planned 1959 American tour to awe audiences with Soviet choreographers’ great accomplishments and Soviet performers’ superb abilities. Relying on extensive research, Cadra Peterson McDaniel examines whether the objectives behind Soviet cultural exchange and the specific aims of the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1959 American tour provided evidence of a thaw in American-Soviet relations. Interwoven throughout this study is an examination of the Soviets’ competing efforts to create ballets encapsulating Communist ideas while simultaneously reinterpreting pre-revolutionary ballets so that these works were ideologically acceptable. McDaniel investigates the rationale behind the creation of the Bolshoi’s repertoire and the Soviet leadership’s objectives and interpretation of the tour’s success as well as American response to the tour. The repertoire included the four ballets, Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, Giselle, and The Stone Flower, and two Highlights Programs, which included excerpts from various pre- and post-revolutionary ballets, operas, and dance suites. How the Americans and the Soviets understood the Bolshoi’s success provides insight into how each side conceptualized the role of the arts in society and in political transformation. American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere demonstrates the ballet’s role in Soviet foreign policy, a shift to "artful warfare," and thus emphasizes the significance of studying cultural exchange as a key aspect of Soviet foreign policy and analyzes the continued importance of the arts in twenty-first century Russian politics.
Download or read book Rethinking Prokofiev written by Rita McAllister and published by . This book was released on 2020 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 pass�. 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 Sergei Prokofiev s Alexander Nevsky written by Kevin Bartig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Audiences have long enjoyed Sergei Prokofiev's musical score for Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film Alexander Nevsky. The historical epic cast a thirteenth-century Russian victory over invading Teutonic Knights as an allegory of contemporary Soviet strength in the face of Nazi warmongering. Prokofiev's and Eisenstein's work proved an enormous success, both as a collaboration of two of the twentieth century's most prominent artists and as a means to bolster patriotism and national pride among Soviet audiences. Arranged as a cantata for concert performance, Prokofiev's music for Alexander Nevsky music proved malleable, its meaning reconfigured to suit different circumstances and times. Author Kevin Bartig draws on previously unexamined archival materials to follow Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky from its inception through the present day. He considers the music's genesis as well as the surprisingly different ways it has engaged listeners over the past eighty years, from its beginnings as state propaganda in the 1930s to showpiece for high-fidelity recording in the 1950s to open-air concert favorite in the post-Soviet 1990s.
Download or read book The Classical Music Lover s Companion to Orchestral Music written by Robert Philip and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 969 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invaluable guide for lovers of classical music designed to enhance their enjoyment of the core orchestral repertoire from 1700 to 1950 Robert Philip, scholar, broadcaster, and musician, has compiled an essential handbook for lovers of classical music, designed to enhance their listening experience to the full. Covering four hundred works by sixty-eight composers from Corelli to Shostakovich, this engaging companion explores and unpacks the most frequently performed works, including symphonies, concertos, overtures, suites, and ballet scores. It offers intriguing details about each piece while avoiding technical terminology that might frustrate the non-specialist reader. Philip identifies key features in each work, as well as subtleties and surprises that await the attentive listener, and he includes enough background and biographical information to illuminate the composer's intentions. Organized alphabetically from Bach to Webern, this compendium will be indispensable for classical music enthusiasts, whether in the concert hall or enjoying recordings at home.
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 Taking a Chance on Love written by George Harwood Phillips and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When his friend George Gershwin persuaded Vladimir Dukelsky to change his name to Vernon Duke, what the music world already knew became apparent to the public at large—the man had two musical personas—one as a composer, the other as a tunesmith. One wrote highbrow music, the other lowbrow. Yet the two sides complemented each other. Neither could function without the other. Born and classically trained in imperial Russia, Vladimir Dukelsky (1903–1969) fled the Bolshevik Revolution with his family, discovered American popular music in cosmopolitan Constantinople, and pursued his budding interest to New York before his passion for classical music drew him to Paris, where the impresario Serge Diaghilev hired him to compose a ballet for the Ballets Russes. Taking a Chance on Love immerses us in Duke’s dizzying globe-hopping and genre-swapping, as financial concerns and musical passions drive him from composing symphonies to writing songs, from brilliant successes to Broadway flops, and from performing with classical performers to writing books and articles. Throughout, as he crisscrosses the landscape of American music, collaborating with lyricists such as Howard Dietz, Ira Gershwin, and Sammy Cohn, the incomparable Vernon Duke emerges clearly from these pages: sometimes charming, sometimes infuriating, always entertaining. Although Vernon Duke has entered the canon of American standards with such songs as “Taking a Chance on Love,” “I Can’t Get Started,” and “April in Paris,” little is known about the composer with two personas. Taking a Chance on Love brings the intriguing double life of Dukelsky/Duke back into the spotlight, restoring a chapter to the history of the Great American Songbook and to the story of twentieth-century music.
Download or read book Stravinsky s Great Passacaglia written by Donald G. Traut and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Context and composition -- Concerto as catalyst -- Analytical tools and recurring elements -- Counterpoint and tonality in the first movement -- Tetrachords and tritones in the largo -- Points of imitation in the finale
Download or read book Intimate Voices Debussy to Villa Lobos The string quartets of Debussy and Ravel written by David Clampitt and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading authorities explore, in direct and accessible language, chamber-music masterpieces by twenty-one prominent composers since 1900.
Download or read book Prokofiev s Ballets for Diaghilev written by StephenD. Press and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ballet impresario Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev and composer Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev are eminent figures in twentieth-century cultural history, yet this is the first detailed account of their fifteen-year collaboration. The beginning was not trouble-free, but despite two false starts (Ala i Lolli and the first version of its successor, Chout) Diaghilev maintained his confidence in the composer. With his guidance and encouragement Prokofiev established his mature balletic style. After some years of estrangement during which Prokofiev wrote for choreographer Boris Romanov and conductor/publisher Serge Koussevitsky, Diaghilev came to the composer's rescue at a low point in his Western career. The impresario encouraged Prokofiev's turn towards 'a new simplicity' and offered him a great opportunity for career renewal with a topical ballet on Soviet life (Le Pas d'acier). Even as late as 1928-29 Diaghilev compelled Prokofiev to achieve new heights of expressivity in his characterizations (L'Enfant prodigue). Although Western scholars have investigated Prokofiev's operas, piano works, and symphonies, little attention has been paid to his early ballets written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Despite Prokofiev's devotion to opera, it was his ballets for Diaghilev as much as his concertos and solo piano works that earned his renown in Western Europe in the 1920s. Stephen D. Press discusses the genesis of each ballet, including the important contributions of the scenic designers (Mikhail Larionov, Georgy Yakulov and Georges Rouault) and the choreographer/dancers (L?id Massine, Serge Lifar and George Balanchine), and the special relationship between the ballets' progenitors.
Download or read book Russians in Hollywood Hollywood s Russians written by Harlow Robinson and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2007 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Russian emigres in Hollywood and the depiction of Russians in Hollywood films
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music written by Nicole V. Gagné and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decade of the 19th century, modernist sensibilities reached a critical mass and emerged more frequently in music as composers began employing dissonance, polyrhythm, atonality, and densities. Conversely, many 20th-century composers eschewed modernist devices and wrote accessible works in a tonal idiom, which drew chiefly on classical, romantic, and folk models. Then the postmodern sensibility followed, with its enthusiasm for the unprecedented availability of virtually every type of music, andit engendered numerous sub-groups, including multiculturalism, minimalism, multimedia, and free improvisation. Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music focuses on modernist and postmodern classical music worldwide from 1890to the present. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries, with more than 60 entries explaining the methods, styles, and acoustic and electronic media peculiar tonew music, and over 350 entries giving essential information on the lives and work of the people who have composed and performed that music. Those entries also include pop, jazz, and rock composer/musicians whose work either overlaps the realm of classical music or else is so radical within its own field that it merits discussion in this context. This book is a must for anyone, musician or non-musician, student or professional, who seeks to research and learn more about any significant aspect of modern and contemporary classical music worldwide.
Download or read book In Stravinsky s Orbit written by Klara Moricz and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bolsheviks’ 1917 political coup caused a seismic disruption in Russian culture. Carried by the first wave of emigrants, Russian culture migrated West, transforming itself as it interacted with the new cultural environment and clashed with exported Soviet trends. In this book, Klára Móricz explores the transnational emigrant space of Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Dukelsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Nicolas Nabokov, and Arthur Lourié in interwar Paris. Their music reflected the conflict between a modernist narrative demanding innovation and a narrative of exile wedded to the preservation of prerevolutionary Russian culture. The emigrants’ and the Bolsheviks’ contrasting visions of Russia and its past collided frequently in the French capital, where the Soviets displayed their political and artistic products. Russian composers in Paris also had to reckon with Stravinsky’s disproportionate influence: if they succumbed to fashions dictated by their famous compatriot, they risked becoming epigones; if they kept to their old ways, they quickly became irrelevant. Although Stravinsky’s neoclassicism provided a seemingly neutral middle ground between innovation and nostalgia, it was also marked by the exilic experience. Móricz offers this unexplored context for Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, shedding new light on this infinitely elusive term.
Download or read book Prokofiev s Soviet Operas written by Nathan Seinen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a critical and contextual study of the last four operas of Prokofiev, the leading opera composer in Stalin's Soviet Union.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Russian Music written by Daniel Jaffé and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian music today has a firm hold around the world in the repertoire of opera houses, ballet companies, and orchestras. The music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergey Rachmaninov, Sergey Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich is very much today’s lingua franca both in the concert hall and on the soundtracks of international blockbusters from Hollywood. Meanwhile, the innovations of Modest Musorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Igor Stravinsky have played their crucial role in the development of Western music, influencing the work of virtually every notable composer of the past century. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries for each of Russia’s major performing organizations and performance venues, and on specific genres such as ballet, film music, symphony and church music. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian Music.
