Taking the 5th--Prokofiev’s, That Is

The attention given in 1991 to the works of centenarian Sergei Prokofiev seems to confirm his position as a composer who created great works without being a Great Composer.

That is, while we admire and learn from his best, his numerous flops and middling creations don’t expand our knowledge, as they do with, say, Stravinsky or Bartok.

The 1944 Fifth Symphony, likely to emerge as Prokofiev’s most durable large-scale work, hardly lacks recorded representation. But for some old-timers, Ernest Ansermet’s 1964 edition with his Orchestre de la Suisse Romande remains the yardstick after nearly three decades of slicker and more grandiose interpretations.

It’s available on CD for the first time courtesy of a British label named IMP (which stands for Innovative Music Productions--really!). The catalogue number is 9006.

There hasn’t been a Fifth to match Ansermet’s in projecting the symphony’s combination of sardonic wit, tricky rhythmicality and Romantic breadth. But while the result may sound “inspired”--this finale is as blazingly intense as one is ever likely to hear--Ansermet was the most exacting of leaders. He insisted that if an intelligent listener couldn’t hear how a work was constructed, either the composer or the conductor wasn’t doing his job.

Yet the Ansermet-Suisse Romande relationship was an anomaly: a master conductor with a predilection for virtuoso 20th-Century music in charge of a second-string orchestra with which he produced interpretive prodigies for half a century. It was a symbiosis unlikely to be duplicated today, when conductors seem more often intimidated by their orchestras than loved by them.

The Atlanta Symphony, by contrast, is today a sleekly efficient instrument, expertly coping with the most demanding assignments. Its Prokofiev Fifth, under Yoel Levi’s direction, makes light of every hazard the composer puts in its members’ way (Telarc 80289).

But when the music reaches a peak of dark expressivity, as it does in the third movement, Levi’s determinedly slow pacing brings the project to a grinding, fatal halt.

The fillup brings to 25 the number of CD editions of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony currently available. Yawn.

IMP offers no fillup to Ansermet’s Fifth. But the asking price, about $10, hardly constitutes thievery, and the transfer is so faithful to the superbly natural-sounding original that a cynical listener might be tempted to observe that we’ve unlearned a lot about recording technique in the past quarter-century.

Another elderly (1959) Prokofiev Fifth likewise makes its first CD appearance: that by the Minneapolis Symphony, as the Minnesota Orchestra was then called, under Antal Dorati, in a Philips mid-priced reissue from its putatively stereophile Mercury “Living Presence” series (432 753).

To these ears it ranks among the most crude, overdriven and superficial readings to which this work has been subjected. The orchestra sounds as if it had been recorded in a tiny acoustical torture chamber, which in effect creates a chamber reduction--”Hey folks, we shrunk the orchestra!”--of the lavishly scored Fifth Symphony.

The rest of Dorati’s Prokofiev program, more humanely recorded, consists of the tacky “Scythian Suite” and the usual suite from “Love for Three Oranges,” both noisily and hurriedly played, this time by the London Symphony.

Happier news from the Prokofiev front arrives in the form of his two excellent string quartets, in competing recorded editions.

The London-based Chilingirian Quartet presents rather beefy readings of both, with Chandos’ lush recording (8929) equally ill-suited to these spare works.

The preferred edition is by the Paris Quartet (Chant du Monde 278 1058), with its tautly inflected rhythms, strong, tight ensemble and aptly astringent sonics. There’s a bonus too: Prokofiev’s 1947 Solo Violin Sonata, which neatly combines the composer’s scholarly and extrovert styles, dashingly executed by Luben Yordanoff, the Paris Quartet’s first violinist.

High marks, finally, to a Prokofiev solo piano recital by Barry Douglas (RCA 60779).

His program separates a pair of flashy sonatas, the little-known Second and the celebrated Seventh, with the composer’s arrangements of dance excerpts from his “Love for Three Oranges,” “Cinderella” and “War and Peace.”

Douglas projects an innate feeling for the percussive ejaculations of the Second, spins out the “Cinderella” pieces with dreamy eloquence, and in the Seventh, when you think that he’s reached the limits of manic drive, Douglas finds an extra, seemingly superhuman store of energy and rhythmic acuity to bring the sonata to a roof-rattling conclusion.