SERGEI PROKOFIEV

No Prokofiev recorded anthology would be complete without a performance of Peter and the Wolf, and here the narrator comes in the person of Lina Prokofiev, the composer’s widow. Recorded for Chandos when she was nearly ninety, Music magazine deemed this recording ‘first choice’ and it offers a most delightful and magnetic performance.

Peter and the Wolf is complemented here with a suite from the ballet Cinderella, Gramophone described the recorded performance as ‘warmly persuasive, bringing out the sensuousness… As in earlier records of the series, the playing is rich and brilliant’. The disc is completed with a number of shorter pieces, all associated with poetical works by Alexander Pushkin.

Prokofiev wrote the music for Peter and the Wolf in four weeks to his own text, and spent another week orchestrating it. The idea was to interweave the story-telling with music of easily recognisable colours and contours, each character having its own motif played every time by the same instrument, and each identified by the story-teller in the introduction. In some ways it was an extension of a much earlier idea he had when, in 1914 he set The Ugly Duckling for singer and piano.

Following the success of Romeo and Juliet, Prokofiev was quickly asked to compose another, Cinderella based on the traditional fairy tale. He had sketched a draft of two acts when war broke out between the USSR and Germany, and he returned to it only in 1943. The music was finished the following year, but production delayed until the war had ended. It was premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on 21 November 1945.

The composer’s widow contributes a spirited narration of Peter and the Wolf, whose delicious score is played and conducted in roistering, colourful style – so is the Cinderella Suite
For many, the most popular reissue in the series will be the utterly delightful performance of Peter and the Wolf, the narration of which is both authentically and beautifully delivered by Prokofiev’s widow Lina, then in her late eighties. As the music is outstandingly well played and then recording is magnificent, this has to be the finest version ever of this perennial masterpiece


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