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Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Prokofiev: War and Peace
Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:
This will be the fourth time over more than four decades of lyric theater broadcasting that I have presented a recording of Sergei Prokofiev's operatic treatment of Leo Tolstoy's epic novel. Prokofiev's Voina i Mir ("War and Peace," 1941-43) sets forth a panorama of Russian history in thirteen tableaux. Prokofiev composed the opera during one of the darkest moments in that history, as Hitler's invading forces were being beaten back on Russian soil by the Red Army, with obvious parallels found in Napoleon's unsuccessful invasion of 1812. The Soviet authorities permitted public performance of selected scenes from the opera in Moscow in June of 1945, following the Red Army's victory over Germany. Prokofiev continued to revise this work up to his death in 1953. He never got to hear it in its entirety in his lifetime.
The entire work was recorded for the Soviet state record label Melodiya with the cast, chorus and orchestra of Moscow's famed Bolshoi Theatre, conducted by Alexander Melik-Pashayev. The recording was picked up for issue in the US by Columbia Masterworks in 1974 on four stereo LPs. That's the full version of the opera I aired way back on Sunday, January 22, 1984, and again on Sunday, November 12, 2006. In between those dates came a Fidelio CD release of W & P in a production by the Sofia National Opera of Bulgaria (Sunday, May 25, 1997). The Columbia LPs reside in our station's classical music record library, which also holds a three LP set in monaural sound under the MGM Heliodor label. This vintage recording from 1956 gives the ten scene/four act earlier version. I have ignored this shorter version for way too long, perhaps because I thought a Viennese production would be unworthy of consideration in the case of a very ethnic Russian lyric stagework. So is it broadcast worthy? Judge for yourself as you listen to the cast, chamber chorus, and orchestra of the Vienna Opera, as conducted by Werner Janssen.