Comparison (audio only) Recording:
BBCPO/Gianandrea Noseda CHANDOS
CHAN 10058
This work was Prokofiev’s
last music. The pen literally fell from
his hand onto this page when he suffered
his fatal stroke. Fortunately the music
was actually complete; he was merely
touching up orchestrations to suit the
specific acoustics of the hall for the
first performance, something that was
to be easily completed by an assistant.
As the first performance ended up a
failure, these revisions were of little
importance anyway.
Late Prokofiev is problematic.
There are those who say his long disabling
illness affected his writing ability.
True, he came to rely on assistants
to write out full scores from his musical
shorthand notes. True, his last music
is different in color from earlier Prokofiev:
it is more uniformly somber, less quirky,
more carefully laid out. But as with
Vaughan Williams I think we will some
day come to realize that his music simply
got better as he got older. He’d finished
his experiments and knew exactly how
to say what he wanted to say. And, he
began exploring new esthetic areas.
I think this work,
in contrast to Prokofiev’s earlier ballets,
is an attempt at the dance-symphony
typified by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake
and Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps.
Neither of these works was successful
as a ballet in their earliest performances
and the same was true of Stone Flower.
And the symphonies Prokofiev was emulating
were not his own previous symphonies,
but those of Mahler. In other words,
I believe Stone Flower is Prokofiev’s
Eighth Symphony and is intended
to represent a departure towards a whole
new symphonic style.
This is a completely
new choreography set to a new performing
version consisting of the following
numbers from the original score, in
order: 1-3, 5, 7-16, 19-23, 25-27, 29-30,
32-40, 23, 18, 1, 41-46. This is substantially
the whole ballet, with only numbers
4, 17, 24, 28, and 31 cut, and 1, 23,
and 18 repeated. The complete recording
times at 148 minutes, so perhaps 28
minutes of music have been cut within
numbers and by otherwise speeding up
the performance. As in his Romeo
and Juliet, Prokofiev re-used music
here from other sources, notably the
Ivan the Terrible music. There
are unmistakable influences of Agnes
DeMille in the "Russian" folk
dances.
The story concerns
Danila, the young apprentice’s desire
to create the most perfect work of art,
a malachite chalice in the form of a
"stone flower." He makes the
mistake of ignoring his true love, Katerina,
while he pursues his artistic project.
As a result, the town drunk, Seryevan,
goes after the abandoned girl who is
rescued by the men at the carnival.
The Mistress of the Mountain, Danila’s
artistic muse, first murders Seryevan,
and then tries to capture the soul of
Danila, tempting him with all the beauties
of the gemstones, each of which performs
a special dance. But he resists her
and she punishes him by chaining him
to the rocks in her cavern. A fire spirit
enchants Katerina and leads her to the
cavern where Danila is held captive.
The two women battle for his soul; he
breaks free, fights off the Mistress
of the Mountain and he and Katerina
embrace. The Mistress of the Mountain,
generous in defeat, returns them to
the forest and in a final tableau blesses
their love.
Video is standard 1990
broadcast quality, probably transferred
directly to NTSC from Russian SECAM.
Or, since most of the video crew appeared
to be Japanese, perhaps it was an original
NTSC production. I got the best sound
from the dts tracks. Surround
perspective is natural; orchestral detail
opens up nicely, with applause coming
from the rear and the little bit of
stage noise, about what you would hear
in a live performance, confined to the
center front. When twenty dancers leap
in the air at once, you are going hear
them come down, however gracefully they
do it. An audience is present and they
applaud at the end of spectacular set
pieces, of which there are a good number.
A couple of times the audience reaction
sounds like a canned applause track,
most other times it sounds natural,
which suggests that this video was probably
spliced together from several taped
full performances with some additional
music recorded without an audience.
That is to say someone has gone to a
great deal of trouble to give us a seamless
high quality presentation.
Although Prokofiev’s
title included the word "pantomime",
traditional classical ballet lovers
will be delighted with most of the dancing
which is utterly spectacular throughout,
each of the four principals delivering
a legendary performance. Nikolai Dorokhov
performs brilliantly, especially in
his obligatory display piece with multiple
rapid turns and spectacular leaps. Lyudmilla
Semenyaka is heartbreakingly gentle
and graceful as the young lover; Nina
Semizorova is magisterial and charismatic
as the magical Mistress of the Copper
Mountain and her duet with Dorokhov
offers some of the most dramatic and
spectacular dancing I’ve ever seen.
Yuri Vetrov as the violent, evil, drunk
miner is brilliantly in character throughout.
It is a constant wonder how he can stumble
and stagger so violently and be so graceful
about doing it. When the earth opens
up and swallows him alive, it is the
most horrifying on-stage death since
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites.
I did not make a detailed
comparison of the audio only recording
with the soundtrack of the DVD for several
reasons. First, both are extremely effective
and without obvious flaw in my memory.
Second, an audio-only version should
be different from a video soundtrack
in that real dancers don’t have
to dance to it, so tempi and transitions
can be performed entirely musico-logically
without reference to such considerations
as to whether there’s actually
time to get from A to B. As a result,
comparison might be unfair, since the
sound track to the danced version is
not supposed to be listened to by itself,
nor is the audio-only recording supposed
to be danced to. My feeling is that
with this work you want to own both
versions, for the symphonic qualities
of the score would be less obvious in
a theater version than in the complete
concert version.
Paul Shoemaker
The Bolshoi Ballet 
ARTHAUS
MUSIC EUROARTS 101 121 [120.00] 
for
details
