May 15, 2009: Beyond cyberspace: the concert experience through recordings

When I first wrote about "virtual" concerts as an alternative for those on a tight budget, I assumed that the concert experience would be delivered through cyberspace.  However, this assumption overlooked the wealth of opportunities afforded by both audio and video recordings of concert performances.  While such documents often have to deal with problems such as audience noise and the risk of mistakes in the execution of a performance, they tend to provide more of the spontaneity of the actual performing situation, which is almost always far more interesting than any product of meticulously planned recording and editing sessions.  These documents are of even more interest when they capture a particularly historical occasion, thus allowing the listener/viewer to return to a context that may be as interesting as the music itself.

Having recently read Simon Morrison's book, The People's Artist:  Prokofiev's Soviet Years, I discovered that, where Sergei Prokofiev was concerned, the context of the last decade of his life was a particularly tragic one.  There is thus a certain poignant value in having an audio document of the first performance of one of his compositions from this period at a concert where he was present in the audience.  The composition was the cello sonata (Opus 119) composed in 1949 for the 22-year old Mstislav Rostropovich, who first performed it with pianist Sviatoslav Richter in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire on March 1, 1950.

The tragedy began early in 1945 when, according to the diary of Nikolai Myaskovsky, Prokofiev suffered severe head trauma as a result of a bad fall and never fully recovered from the accident.  Morrison paints a depressing picture of a Soviet medical system that could do little by way of diagnosis, let alone treatment, and would recommend little more than a cessation of all activities on Prokofiev's part.  This amounted to asking Prokofiev to give up composing, which, of course, he could not do;  but he became more dependent on others to assist him in his work.  Rostropovich was such an assistant for the Opus 119 cello sonata, proposing changes to the cello part and editing the version that was finally performed.  Prokofiev also eased the burden of composition by drawing upon earlier material, the most recognizable of which is probably the "Field of the Dead" mezzo-soprano aria that was included in the soundtrack for the film Alexander Nevsky.  Nevertheless, in spite of his weakened state, Prokofiev attended the world premiere performance, which was well received.

In recent years this sonata has not received much attention.  In their Prokofiev entry for The Oxford Companion to Music, Geoffrey Norris and David Nice describe it as using "apparent simplicity to express poignant emotion with great originality."  In that respect they place it in the same category as his Opus 131 seventh symphony, recently performed when the London Symphony Orchestra visited San Francisco.  At that time I wrote that the symphony had a "valedictory feel;"  but I think that the cello sonata is more forward-looking.  The sonata is less a gesture of Prokofiev looking back on his life with mixed emotions and more an anticipation of the promising talent of Rostropovich, poignant to the extent that Prokofiev knew that opportunities for any further collaborations would be limited.  (In fact he composed two more works for Rostropovich:  the Opus 125 "symphony-concerto" and the Opus 132 "concertino," which had to be orchestrated by Dmitri Kabalevsky.)

The availability of the recording itself is also an interesting story.  When Rostropovich left the Soviet Union in 1974, he managed to get away with the recordings he had made there.  He turned these over to EMI, who released them as a 13-CD set entitled Rostropovich:  The Russian Years.  This item has since been discontinued, but both new and used copies are available through Amazon.com.  Some of those used copies are definitely within the range of those concerned about expenses, particularly if that expense is shared by a group.  The discontinued set has now been replaced by a Complete EMI Recordings Rostropovich box with 25 CDs of music, a documentary CD, and 2 DVDs of the six cello suites of Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 1007–12).  This obviously costs more, but used copies are now on the market.

Rostropovich had already been established as a distinguished cellist before his encounter with Prokofiev.  However, the concert recording of the cello sonata is the earliest recording for which the date is known.  Thus, in many ways that recording is a document of the encounter between Prokofiev's twilight and Rostropovich's dawn.  While it may be popular to dismiss Prokofiev's last compositions has having been eroded by the abuses of Soviet life, there is a spirit to this recording, which must have been there in the Moscow Conservatoire and was then captured for posterity.  In the repertoire of virtual concert experiences, this one should not be missed.