Sergei Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky by Bartig Kevin;

Author:Bartig, Kevin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2017-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

One who did sniff was the oft-dyspeptic composer Arthur Berger, who complained generally about the popularity of Soviet works with American audiences. “Some undertakings,” he carped, “are easily eclipsed by inferior ones which survive through an accidental or contrived conspiracy with our dominant international sympathies or conceptual concerns of the moment.” 46 Although serving different ends, Berger’s and Downes’s assertions speak to the same truism, that wartime had afforded unprecedented opportunities for works like the Nevsky Cantata. Berger implies that Prokofiev’s work would never have gained a foothold during peacetime, when works perceived as being “above politics”—the transcendent classics and objective modernist exercises—assured the high-art status of symphonic institutions.

Downes was not alone in his adulation, however. At the same concert was the critic Donald Fuller, who dashed off the following for the influential specialist journal Modern Music:

[Prokofiev] had not attempted a work on a really heroic scale since the Scythian Suite, which many wish had served as more of a point of departure for his whole development. The gray, poignant landscape of the opening is huge and exciting and its icy tone penetrates much of the cantata. There is a tautness in the chorus’s folksong style which never relaxes into the easy, distended sentiment rarely avoided in such writing for large groups. Nor are there the usual unpleasantly calculated climaxes. Only after one has been swept to the high points is there time to realize how irresistibly one was taken there. The section depicting the battle on the ice has an especial force. The orchestration is admirable for its superb sound, but above all for its delineation of a richly allusive atmosphere, as fine in its way as Stravinsky’s very different evocation in the Symphonie des Psaumes [sic]. 47

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