Until this evening I had not seen Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky combined with the Prokofiev score, and the effect is quite different from hearing Prokofiev’s stand-alone cantata version with which most people are familiar.  With fewer breaks, the cantata has the aural sweep of a tone poem, rather than the ebb and surge of the film, about half of which has no musical accompaniment at all.

William D. Brohn reconstructed this current version in 1987 from the film soundtrack and Prokofiev’s expanded orchestration.  In his notes, producer John Goberman describes locating a suitable print of the film, complete with its abysmal 1938 optical soundtrack.  After analysis of the cantata, Brohn restored Prokofiev’s cuts and created the symphonic orchestration, which can now be presented by any orchestra, anywhere.  A   cinematic masterpiece has been restored with enough technological savvy to engage listeners of any age, who can now enjoy a pristine print combined with the massive sensory impact of the live score.  I didn’t feel any compromises had been made in the experience, given that this film is over 65 years old.

For those unfamiliar with Eisenstein’s masterpiece, it depicts Alexander Nevsky rousing his people to action and ultimately leading them to victory over an invasion by the Knights of the Teutonic Order.  The film’s power is matched by Eisenstein’s keen eye, with images that often are indelibly etched in viewers’ minds.  Many are downright scary, such as Eisenstein’s surreal costumes.  The hooded Knights, in white robes with crosses, evoke Klansmen, and their helmets are a bit unnerving, topped with the claw of a bird, a set of twisted horns, or a human hand.  Other scenes, such as the ravaging of the town of Pskov, show soldiers executing citizens and tossing small children onto a fire.  At the climax of the battle, the Germans are backed onto an ice floe that cracks and melts, so their heavy armor causes them to sink, thrashing to their deaths in the water.

In the fiery opening, the chorus was so idiomatic that if I hadn’t known better I would have thought they had been flown in from St. Petersburg for the weekend.  So kudos to the New York Choral Artists for such persuasive pronunciation, and to their coach Joseph Flummerfelt, for being in the forefront of the evening’s many pleasures.  The Philharmonic’s exuberant percussionists offered an exuberant array of gongs to complete the overload.  As the citizens prepare for battle (“Arise, people of Russia”) the orchestra’s strings and saxophone melded with yet more gongs to create the stirring hymn – one of the calmer parts of Prokofiev’s vision.  Interestingly, during the enormous ice battle scene, the music actually drops out in several places, leaving the brittle clicking of metal on metal to make its own effect – like thousands of amplified beetles – along with the grunting of soldiers heaving, thrusting, dying.  No further sound is needed to portray the immensity of the slaughter.

 

One of the evening’s finest moments came in the penultimate section, “The Field of the Dead,” when mezzo-soprano Meredith Arwady stood to deliver a sorrowful song depicting her anguished search for the two men vying for her hand in marriage.  Although her moment was brief, her pure voice (again, quite Russian-sounding) poured into the hall with impressive passion and loneliness.

Xian Zhang has been getting lots of attention recently and it is easy to see why.  Her diminutive stature houses an assured presence on the podium – one who is able to transmit clear signals to the musicians – and she seemed to be having a tremendous amount of fun, too.  Directing this piece involves not only eliciting color from those onstage but also coordinating their work with the film.  With the score in front of her and two flat video monitors behind the podium to assist in synchronizing the music with the action onscreen, Zhang drew a magnificent torrent of sound from the orchestra.  Indeed, the only minus might have been that the orchestral impact was so huge that it occasionally overwhelmed, with music louder than the digital soundtracks commonplace in most movie houses these days.  But from the triumphant roar of the audience at the end, no one was complaining.

 

 

Bruce Hodges

 

 

Photographs © Chris Lee