Prokofiev at 101: New Releases Salute 1991’s ‘Other Guy’

Prokofiev was the other guy last year, just as he came in a distant second in the world news on the day he died, March 5, 1953--the day on which Stalin also died and, naturally, got the headlines.

While the recording industry offered quantitative acknowledgment of the centenary of the Russian composer’s birth, enthusiasm and scholarship were absent from its efforts. There were no neglected masterpieces or even noteworthy re-examinations of the repertory standards.

The best of what was recorded in 1991 was saved, intentionally or not, for this year, with fear of competing with Mozart madness no longer a commercial consideration.

In the few months of 1992 we have already been given two noteworthy interpretations of the Fifth Symphony, music that has hardly suffered from neglect by the orchestral and conducting elite.

Performances as distinctive as those by the St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) Philharmonic under Yuri Temirkanov (RCA 60984) and the Philadelphia Orchestra under its departing music director, Riccardo Muti (Philips 432 083), are, however, never superfluous.

The two editions could not be more dissimilar. Temirkanov views the Fifth as an extension of the Russian Romantic tradition. To him, the strings are the orchestra’s lush, vibrant heart, in a reading at once both dark-toned and mobile. Temirkanov’s corner movements are, surprisingly, faster than Muti’s while retaining a feeling of weightiness not at all inappropriate to the music.

Muti favors a leaner, more contemporary-Western sound and interpretive stance. Under his tidy, detail-oriented direction, the symphony’s fast second and fourth movements, with their short-phrased, piping wind solos, possess a cutting edge that contrasts with the Russians’ rounded sonority.

RCA’s coupling is yet another “Lieutenant Kije” Suite (the all-instrumental version, of which we already have about 15 CD editions), while Philips offers one of Prokofiev’s Soviet potboilers, “The Meeting of the Volga and the Don.”

The jarring, thickly textured Second, designed to provoke the listener’s rage, and the seemingly childlike Seventh--generally regarded as the composer’s most problematic symphonies--appear on a Deutsche Grammophon CD (435 027), with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.

Whatever one may think of the style and substance of the Second, there is greater clarification of its dense fabric here than in any of the hardly numerous prior recordings. Credit execution of transcendent skill and engineering that digs more deeply into the component sections of the orchestra than was the case with the glassy-slick Berlin Philharmonic recordings of the Karajan era.

And the surface sweetness of Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony, his last--here with its original minor-key ending--is balanced on DG by a rhythmic urgency seldom felt in Ozawa’s work with his usual orchestral partners, the Boston Symphony.

One of the least known of Prokofiev’s mature chamber works, the Quintet, Opus 39, written just before and in somewhat the same defiant spirit as the Second Symphony, makes a rare recorded appearance in an attractive program by members of our own Southwest Chamber Music Society (Cambria 1072).

The virtuoso ensemble for the Quintet comprises oboist Stuart Horn, clarinetist David Howard, violinist Peter Marsh, violist Jan Karlin and bassist Paul Zibits, capturing the score’s mordant humor with elegance and panache.

The disc further offers Prokofiev’s nostalgic, klezmer-like Overture on Hebrew Themes, with Howard’s velvet clarinet as its centerpiece, and three gems by Francis Poulenc: the Trio for piano, oboe and bassoon, the “Elegie” for horn and piano and the familiar Sextet for piano and winds.

Performances are, again, first-rate. They serve, sadly, as a memorial to the skillful pianist in all three pieces, Albert Dominguez, who died shortly after the recording was released.