Excellent Performance
TM | Sellersville, PA | 02/21/2010
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Neeme Järvi is one of the most consistent and dependable conductors alive today. Here he does a first rate job with both Queen of Spades and Guard for Peace.
I for one love Russian choruses and thoroughly enjoyed the Cold War oratorio "On Guard for Peace". The Queen of Spades Suite is the interesting result of an unrealized, unused film score and is therefore yet another hidden gem. It delights me that Järvi digs up these rare pieces, as he continues to produce a large standing record of Prokofiev's body of work.
With outstanding recorded sound and exceptional performance, the added unique contents of this album make it a `must have' for any Prokofiev enthusiast."
Second-Rate Prokofiev
J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 07/07/2009
(2 out of 5 stars)
"I've consistently praised Neeme Järvi's series of recordings of Prokofiev's orchestral music, most of it issued originally a few years ago and now being reissued on Chandos. This disc contains two works that have been newly recorded. And they are strange works indeed. During the late 1930s Prokofiev wrote three pieces based on works of Pushkin -- incidental music for a production of Pushkin's play, Boris Godunov; incidental music for a stage production of his Eugene Onegin; and music for The Queen of Spades. The latter was never finished and never produced, largely because of a change in attitudes from Stalin's government about what art works should focus on. Strangely, many years later London's Royal Ballet had the idea to use the Queen of Spades music for a ballet based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot (!). British composer Michael Berkeley was enlisted to put together a ballet suite from Prokofiev's sketches. And it is that work we hear on this CD. The music is not quite top-drawer Prokofiev. Further, there is much that is already familiar because it was recycled by Prokofiev into subsequent works. For instance, in the suite's first movement we hear a theme that he later used in his Eighth Piano Sonata, and even more obviously in the second movement we hear great chunks of music that he used virtually unchanged in the slow movement of his popular Fifth Symphony. All that aside, there is not much here to excite any but the most avid Prokofiev fans.
As for the 1950 oratorio 'On Guard for Peace', the less said the better. This is one of those god-awful patriotic oratorios that Stalin's apparatchiks ordered by the yard from the country's composers. This one extols Stalin and the Soviet state, and recalls the wonders and sacrifices of the War. It sets to music such deathless lyrics as 'The Festival of Peace in Moscow/resembles a foaming sea./Squads of young Leninists parade,/singing through the city.' The whole thing is a ponderous, bloviating mess and one wonders why Järvi and Chandos felt it needed to be recorded.
Skip this one.
Scott Morrison"
