The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s intriguing new Prokofiev series is entitled “Man of the People?” and the enigma is all in the question mark.
Beginning at the end with the last of his symphonies, the 7th, was far from arbitrary. This is a piece about enchantment where childhood fairy-tales are revisited from an adulthood of compromised dreams and disillusionment. As with so much in Prokofiev, nothing is quite as it seems.
In his music for the screen satire Lieutenant Kijé which kicked off the series under the relaxed, if not to say understated, baton of Alexander Vedernikov, the juxtaposition of the magical (a poetic “last post” trumpeter ear-stretchingly distant here in the Festival Hall) and the wrily grotesque (moments of earthy bitonality at the ficticious Kijé’s burial) is all part and parcel of the language of a composer who loves to keep an audience on its toes – to engage and then to disorientate. Vedernikov was very laid-back with Kijé, a more genial, throw-away approach than we sometimes hear with bass drum thwacks and discordant raspberries from the brass like cartoonish exclamations and the earthy colourations realised with an air of total “normality”.
Source.
Beginning at the end with the last of his symphonies, the 7th, was far from arbitrary. This is a piece about enchantment where childhood fairy-tales are revisited from an adulthood of compromised dreams and disillusionment. As with so much in Prokofiev, nothing is quite as it seems.
In his music for the screen satire Lieutenant Kijé which kicked off the series under the relaxed, if not to say understated, baton of Alexander Vedernikov, the juxtaposition of the magical (a poetic “last post” trumpeter ear-stretchingly distant here in the Festival Hall) and the wrily grotesque (moments of earthy bitonality at the ficticious Kijé’s burial) is all part and parcel of the language of a composer who loves to keep an audience on its toes – to engage and then to disorientate. Vedernikov was very laid-back with Kijé, a more genial, throw-away approach than we sometimes hear with bass drum thwacks and discordant raspberries from the brass like cartoonish exclamations and the earthy colourations realised with an air of total “normality”.
Source.
London Philharmonic Orchestra / Vedernikov, Royal Festival Hall, London
Edward SECKERSON,The Idependent, 14 January 2012
