St Petersburg, Concert Hall

Sergei Prokofiev. Ivan the Terrible

Oratorio for narrator, soloists, chorus and orchestra
Version by Abram Stasevich (1961)

PERFORMERS:
Yekaterina Sergeyeva (mezzo-soprano)
Mikhail Petrenko (bass)

The Narrator: Mikhail Petrenko

The Mariinsky Orchestra and Chorus
Conductor: Andrei Petrenko

Ivan the Terrible was the second joint project between Sergei Prokofiev and Sergei Eisenstein. Following the triumphant success of Alexander Nevsky Eisenstein conceived a new film that was made even more intense thanks to the music of his genius collaborator. “My comrade composer may have tremendous freedom in all directions” he immediately informed Prokofiev. Work progressed during the war. The lyrics, as with Alexander Nevsky, were written by the semi-disgraced poet Vladimir Lugovskoi (the text of the work was written by Eisenstein himself).
The score was grandiose. In 1997 Marina Rakhmanova and Irina Medvedeva published all surviving parts of the manuscript of the music for Ivan the Terrible – almost forty episodes and a further twelve Orthodox canticles that were incorporated into the film. But Prokofiev did not transform this score into an oratorio, cantata or concert suite. Possibly a fateful role was played by the ban on a sequel to the film and Eisenstein’s death shortly afterwards.
In 1958 Abram Stasevich – a cellist, conductor and composer who wrote music for the film – produced an oratorio from Prokofiev’s materials. He enhanced the form by uniting some episodes and repeating others, while he also significantly altered the orchestration, as the composer’s original to a great extent was aimed at producing mixing effects (Prokofiev compiled incredibly detailed instructions for the sound technician). Since then, other “performance versions” of Ivan the Terrible have appeared, but it is Stasevich’s version, first performed in 1961 and printed in 1962, that remains the most frequently performed.
Anna Bulycheva

Age category 6+

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