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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Composing for the Red Screen written by Kevin Bartig and published by . This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound film captivated Sergey Prokofiev during the final two decades of his life: he considered composing for nearly two dozen pictures, eventually undertaking eight of them, all Soviet productions. Drawing on newly available sources, Composing for the Red Screen examines - for the first time - the full extent of this prodigious cinematic career.
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 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Audiences have long enjoyed Sergei Prokofiev's musical score for Alexander Nevsky, a historical film that cast a thirteenth-century Russian victory over invading Teutonic Knights as an allegory of contemporary Soviet strength in the face of Nazi warmongering. The cantata that Prokofiev derived from the score has proven even more popular and remains one of his most-performed works. This critical companion explores this music and the ways in which it has engaged listeners, performers, and artists throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tracing its path from state propaganda to repertory classic.
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.
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 Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by Boston : Northeastern University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A recently (1989) discovered diary of the Russian composer's two-month visit to his native Soviet Union in 1927. Also includes five short stories and his Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Download or read book S Prokofiev written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by The Minerva Group, Inc.. This book was released on 2000 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sergei Prokofiev was a bold innovator who eschewed the beaten path in art all his life, often in defiance of orthodox tastes. His compositions, many of which are today recognized masterpieces of musical art, usually evoked either genuine bewilderment or sharp criticism when first performed.Prokofiev's music is performed today all over the world; his works are studied at music schools everywhere.The first two parts of this book are devoted to the composer's own writings (his autobiographical notes, articles and reviews), the rest to articles about Prokofiev by prominent Soviet musicians, artists, and others who were associated with him at one or another period of his life.
Download or read book Sergei Prokofiev written by Christina Guillaumier and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2024-10-13 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical biography of the twentieth-century Russian composer and pianist. This wide-ranging and incisive biography unfolds the life and work of the much-loved twentieth-century composer Sergei Prokofiev. In it, Christina Guillaumier reveals Prokofiev’s surprisingly optimistic spirit amidst a tumultuous backdrop of geopolitical chaos and ever-shifting musical landscapes. Guillaumier breathes life into the people and worlds that shaped Prokofiev’s complicated life, capturing the unwavering passion of a musical genius whose love for his craft transcended all barriers. This new critical account is a vivid portrait of the artist’s indomitable drive.
