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Prokofiev/Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky: Xiang Zhang, cond., Kathryn Weld, mezzo-soprano, John Goberman, producer, Seattle Symphony, Seattle Symphony Chorale, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 15.6.2007 (BJ)


Just about everything the Seattle Symphony and its collaborators could have done to make this live combination of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky score with Eisenstein’s celebrated film was done, and done very well. The orchestra played, and its associated chorus sang, with enormous gusto. Kathryn Weld was an eloquent soloist. Xian Zhang’s conducting was unfailingly competent and punctual, and gave due prominence to both the lyrical and the more pervasive heroic aspects of the music (if perhaps a shade too much to the almost omnipresent tuba part). The film itself was effectively projected on a large screen suspended above all the live performers.

Exactly what we were hearing was not, as the program note alleged, “the film score in its original and complete form,” but what might be called a back-formation of it, combining the full length of the film version with the heavier orchestration of the cantata Prokofiev later extracted from it. It was presumably for this rearrangement that William D. Brohn’s name was listed among the concert credits as responsible for “music adaptation,” along with that of John Goberman as producer.

What this all added up to was often thrilling, and it was also amusing at times, though perhaps not as many times as the audience responded with laughter. Sergey Eisenstein is widely respected as one of the great directorial innovators of the cinema. But there are moments especially in his handling of individual characters, as distinct from his mostly magisterial deployment of large crowds, that tend towards the unintentionally funny in their exaggeratedly solemn would-be sublimity. It is not for such lapses that Nevsky has become famous, but rather for such tours de force as the representation of the battle on the ice, which is tumultuously gripping to watch and listen to, if neither quite as coherent nor even as poetic as Laurence Olivier’s and William Walton’s handling of Agincourt in Henry V.

It might not be unfair, though the suggestion may shock some readers, to find a certain affinity between Alexander Nevsky and Britten’s Peter Grimes. That opera puts a less-than-convincing libretto together with a somewhat threadbare score in a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts: the combined effect packs a formidable emotional punch. There is nothing in Nevsky that comes within a mile of the concentrated artistic impact of the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein’s much greater film Battleship Potemkin. Rather like Britten’s opera, Nevsky’s combined presentation on screen and on the concert platform offers hugely enjoyable entertainment and some touches of poignancy. Even at its best, however, it does not reach the level of the finest moments in Grimes. Is this, in the last analysis, great art? I don’t think so.

Bernard Jacobson

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