SERGEI PROKOFIEV

The music from The Buffoon is complemented here by two further colourful suites, that from the opera The Love for Three Oranges and the lesser-known, late Waltz Suite, which brings together music from the opera War and Peace, the ballet Cinderella and the film Lermontov.

High Performance Review wrote of this recording at its original release, ‘Prokofiev’s ballet score [The Buffoon] was written for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but it’s doubtful that any ballet company ever has danced to such vivid, raucous playing as Järvi inspires in this concert suite. Chandos has blessed the Scottish National Orchestra with bright, airy, near demonstration quality sounds, and Järvi provides an enthusiastic reading that sparkles with an abundance of characterful wit and dances with good humour’.

‘Järvi and his orchestra produce brilliantly exciting performances, which are stunningly recorded’, wrote Australian Hi-Fi and Music Review.

The Buffoon (Chout in Russian0)was composed at the instigation of Diaghilev. He asked of the composer ‘Please write msuci that will be truly Russian. Prokofiev, who could not remember a note of traditional folksong was able to find an idiom that suited the tale.

The Love of Three Oranges is an opera composed in 1919 and based on an eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte farce by Carlo Gozzi. It was premiered at Chicago on 30 December 21921, and Prokofiev published his orchestral Suite from it in 1924.

Soon after conducting the premiere of his Fifth Symphony, Prokofiev suffered serious concussion from a fall, and the effects were felt throughout the remaining eight years of his life. Although he had to limit his creative work to two short periods each day, he immersed himself in a number of new projects, one of which was the Waltz Suite. Three of the Waltzes came from Cinderalla, two from War and Peace and the last, the Mephisto Waltz, from his music for the film Lermontov.

In this performance [The Buffoon] both conductor and orchestra rise splendidly to the occasion: here is an impressive realisation of the character studies that make up the Suite


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