A rousing reception for an ode to Stalin

For the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s final program of the season, the conclusion of its “Shadow of Stalin” series, the orchestra screened Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film “Alexander Nevsky” at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday night. Prokofiev’s score was played live. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted.

The Philharmonic raised the rafters (or whatever serves for rafters in Disney), its playing nearly as deafening as we’ve come to expect film music to be in movie theaters. The performance was rousing, just as Prokofiev meant his contribution to this patriotic epic to be. The audience cheered with joy at the end, as happy audiences at Disney typically do when Salonen is on the podium and the Philharmonic is in its vibrant showoff mode.

Eisenstein’s film and Prokofiev’s score are, together, a triumph of stirring, Stalin-enforced populist realism. On the screen, Nevsky, a 13th century Russian hero, prods good-hearted, brave peasants to defeat evil Teutonic invaders. Grand, sweeping diatonic music accompanies broad-chested, baby-faced, golden-haired Russian warriors. Nasty, dissonant, sinuous lines depict the faceless enemy, hidden in tin-can helmets -- an army as inhuman medieval machine.

At the end, the bells of the Russian city Pskov ring in grand splendor; in Disney, they rang in very grand splendor. The chorus (the Pacific Chorale, sounding splendid) sang of the ageless triumph of the Russian people. Goosebumps in listeners were raised. And so were all kinds of moral issues.

“Nevsky,” as every Russian knew in 1938, when the film was made by two of their country’s greatest living artists, glorified Stalin. Prokofiev and Eisenstein were also two frightened artists. But they had a genuine moral cause. Real, live Germans were soon to invade Russia.

From the start, the music was meant to be a major glory of the film. Eisenstein shot some scenes to Prokofiev’s score. The use of a chorus on the soundtrack and a touching song for mezzo-soprano sung to scenes of Russians dead on the battlefield make this almost a film-cantata, and Prokofiev, indeed, created a “Nevsky” cantata for the concert hall from his score.

A case might be made for considering this score the greatest film music of all time -- if it weren’t quite so heavy-handed and if it didn’t sound so shoddy as originally recorded. The orchestra for the soundtrack was small and poor. Prokofiev played with technology, such as by distorting the German music, but with little success. For the cantata, he completely re-orchestrated the work for a philharmonic-sized ensemble.

In 1987, a version of the film score, based on the cantata orchestration, was created to be performed along with the movie. The scratchy dialogue and sound effects remain. The L.A. Philharmonic, conducted by Andre Previn, was the first orchestra to try playing this score live to the film, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The result proved such a success that just about everyone does it now.

But the moral problems have only increased, since hearing the music sound so grand and immediate glorifies Stalin all the more. There has even been the suggestion that clapping at the end is politically inappropriate, because we are, in effect, applauding you know who.

Salonen’s aggressive performance, spectacularly played, took advantage of the Disney acoustic to make the music feel incomparably in your face. Even the battle accompaniment, which can sound like zany ballet music, was given a raw edge.

But in the context of a series that has looked at the way Russian composers and their colleagues in Soviet satellites responded to Stalin’s artistic oppression, the blatancy of Saturday’s performance added the morally refreshing element of discomfort. And in the same context, Prokofiev’s heart-rending song “The Field of the Dead,” sung in deep, dark tones by Ekaterina Gubanova, served as an ambiguous elegy for an era.

What didn’t make a strong impression on this occasion was the film itself. Projection in Disney is compromised by the light onstage. The time has come for the Music Center to spend some money and buy a spiffy, up-to-the-minute giant LCD screen with a huge contrast ratio, or whatever it takes to show a sharp image under concert conditions.

mark.swed@latimes.com