Customer Reviews

The Koussevitsky Edition Volume VIII - Prokofiev: Symphony No. 1 Op. 25 "Classical"; Symphony No. 5 Op. 100; Dance from the ballet "Chout"; Scythian Suite, Op. 20 (recorded 1945-47)

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Prokofiev is one 20th century composer that I find it particularly easy to get along with. He has left the 19th century/late-romantic style behind him as surely as Schoenberg did, and his personal idiom, by turns lyrical, forceful and forceful-lyrical, is very strongly marked and hard to mistake, with little or none of the eclecticism of Shostakovich. It hardly needs adding that it has none of the obscurity of the later Schoenberg, and if my own experience is anything to go by a taste for Stravinsky tends to go along with a parallel taste for Prokofiev.

No doubt Koussevitsky thought he had found like minds when he enlisted the co-operation of Rachmaninov, Medtner and Scriabin in a project to publish as well as perform the works of contemporary Russian composers. It is also sadly clear that he got a bit of a shock on finding that not only Prokofiev's Scythian suite but also Stravinsky's Petrushka were too modernistic for these great turgid giants, and for my own part while I'm not really surprised by the attitude of Rachmaninov and Medtner I might have expected less conservatism from Scriabin, who after all had abandoned tonality in his later works and even imagined that the world would come to an end after the closing measures of one of his own compositions, so radical did he perceive it and himself as being.

This should not just be a disc for convinced enthusiasts for Prokofiev, I would hope. Newcomers to his work are recommended it strongly, despite the date of the performances -- just before and not long after the end of world war II. To help newcomers along, the Classical symphony is here in a performance as fine as most they are likely to hear nowadays. The other two works are more significant, and in these they will find what really makes this disc as special as it is. The fifth symphony in particular dates from around the time of its American premiere, Koussevitsky had totally unique authority in this music, and the Boston Symphony was in one of its phases of being perhaps the world's finest orchestra. The recorded quality has been touched up exceedingly well -- I find that once a certain level of tolerability has been achieved in terms of the sound I stop worrying whether more recent pressings are better technically or not. The sound is really very clear and the stature of the orchestra is perfectly apparent, so my imagination is not having to work excessively hard to compensate for any remaining shortcomings. Whatever eminent modern performances there are to be found, Koussevitsky was still Koussevitsky and irreplaceable.