PROKOFIEV. Incidental Music. Hamlet (1937-38). Boris Godunov (1936). Eugen Onegin, op. 71. Egyptian Nights.
Marina Domaschenko (mezzo), Victor Sawaley (tenor), Yuri Swatenko (tenor), Boris Statsenko (baritone), Chulpan Chamatova (speaker), Jakob Küf (speaker), RIAS Chamber Choir, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra/Michail Jurowski.
Capriccio 7001 (F) (DDD) TT: 188:39 (3 CDs).
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At least one real discovery. Prokofiev's incidental music has languished as an orphan child to his ballets and operas. One can understand this in light of the fact that only two of the four productions listed here made it to performance -- Hamlet and Egyptian Nights -- mostly due to Soviet bureaucratic stupidity, fear of getting Stalin angry, and anti-Semitism against one of the directors. The good old days. Prokofiev put the scores away, recycling some of the music in other works. Excerpts from some, if not all, of these scores have received recordings. A couple of discs have the full scores. This might be one of them; it claims to present all the numbers Prokofiev wrote.

The composer theorized about incidental music and concluded that it served the drama. If a scene was already dramatic, it didn't need music. Furthermore, music shouldn't get in the way of the spoken word. This may lead some to believe that Prokofiev wrote inconspicuous music for these plays. He may have intended to (it's certainly nothing like, say, the Sixth Symphony), but he couldn't really pull off blah. Even his failures (and critics disagree as to which of his works fail) compel a listener's attention.

Prokofiev certainly got A-level material to set: Shakespeare and Pushkin. The Hamlet really is functioning incidental music, with mood-setting, scene changes, and songs for Ophelia and the Gravedigger. It doesn't cohere as an independent suite. However, the individual numbers are fabulous. It's the same with the music to Boris. Don't expect Mussorgsky's bell-ringing Coronation Scene. However, Boris's daughter, Xenia, gets a beautiful song, in an idiom I would have thought outside Prokofiev's range.

The composer made an orchestral suite of Egyptian Nights (an unfinished Pushkin short story based on the tale of Antony and Cleopatra), which for me comes from his second drawer. Of course, Prokofiev's second drawer often outdoes many another composer's first. Here he does not write isolated numbers but makes extensive use of musical themes representing people and ideas, which helps the score cohere.

The real find is the Eugen Onegin (I follow the spelling on the German CD), absolutely new to me, although it has received at least six recordings. The music comes to just below the level of Romeo and Juliet of the previous year and also foreshadows Cinderella, to give you some idea of what the music sounds like. This is Prokofiev at his most lyric and with his habitual texture (usually for night and love) of low bass and high strings, with a solo woodwind in the middle. Much of this score ravishes.

The performers are all solid. Jurowski gives his all to every work here. However, for me the CD has a serious flaw: namely, the inclusion of a lot of melodrama, in which a speaker intones text over the music. My standard line runs, "If the text is interesting, the music detracts, and if the music is interesting, the text detracts." Here, the music has the lion's share of the interest, mainly because the text is Russian, a language that few people not born in that country speak. I certainly don't, so the speakers might as well recite Sid Caesar doubletalk. Furthermore, Capriccio provides no texts. I understand the desire to follow faithfully Prokofiev's intentions, but, really, was this necessary or even smart? The music can stand on its own, without the spoken word. The sound is acceptable, without veering into either the horrid or super-wow. Perhaps if melodrama doesn't annoy you as much as it does me or if you speak Russian, you may enjoy this disc sans reservation. I myself enjoyed a lot of it.

S.G.S. (January 2010)