Customer Reviews

Prokofiev: Eugen Onegin; Pique Dame

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This is a 2-disc set of two of Prokofiev's more obscure works. They have nothing in common with the Tchaikovsky operas of the same name other than being based on the same works by Pushkin. The Onegin disc is an hour and fifteen minutes long and is incidental music to a play based on Pushkin's verse novel that was never staged. I thought the music for the most part pretty vapid plus the voice-over narration (in Russian) to be distracting. The Pique Dame disc is much better but unfortunately only clocks in at a little over 30 minutes. It's incidental music to a film that was never completed. Fortunately Prokofiev recognized its value and recycled a lot of it into his superb 5th symphony. Given the price being asked for this 2-disc set I cannot reccomend it except to the most fanatical of Prokofiev completists. Pique Dame would be worth seeking out on another disc hopefully coupled with something else.

In 1936, as part of a Pushkin commemoration, Prokofiev wrote music to accompany a stage dramatization of Eugene Onegin and a film of the Queen of Spades. Neither project came to fruition, but the music is evocative. Here Mikhail Jurowski does a nice job with the gentle Onegin score, which is uncannily like the nostalgic Americana one might expect from Copland in The Tender Land or perhaps the score to Orson Welles's Magnificent Amberson's -- it is fluid, gently melodic, backward-looking to a simpler time. As pure inspiration this isn't top-drawer Prokofiev, but it's effective and at the same time eerie, given that it was written at the height of Stalin's mass liquidations and show trials. In the style of 19th-century "melodrame," actors speak lines over the music. In this case the speakers are skilled and evocative of the romantic world of Lensky, Tatiana, and Onegin, here turning into a kind of haunting sweet dream.

As a bonus to the 76-min. Onegin score, we get 33 min. of planned soundtrack for the Pique Dame film. The idiom shifts to an uncanny foreshadowing of the kind of rhythmically nervous, compulsive repetitions identified with Bernard Hermann's scores for Hitchock. A dark, brooding quality befitting the doomed Hermann and Lisa hovers in the air, with minimal melody most of the time. Some numbers, however, take us into the lush melodic world of Romeo and Juliet and the Fifth Sym., whichProkofiev used as a final resting place for some of the music.

Both scores are an easy listen, well played by Jurowski's musicians and well recorded by Capriccio. Prokofiev completists will be delighted, and the general listener, too, since this is such an easy, agreeable listen.