Prokofiev festival at Bard College

Prokofiev and Company:
Leon Botstein's anti-Mostly Mozart festival

ROBERT ZALLER

Summertime, and classical music dries up in the Delaware Valley like a thunderstorm in the desert. There are the Mann concerts in July, of course, in which the Philadelphia Orchestra’s normally dumbed-down repertoire gets dumbed down even further. Then, silence until late September. As for chamber music of any variety, forget it.

All big cities in America suffer this problem, of course. New York has Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, a higher-class version of the Mann that endlessly recycles the standards. Maybe the assumption is that the customers have all headed for Cape May or Cape Cod. Maybe no one wants to tackle Stockhausen in a heat wave.

Innovative and exceptional summer programming can indeed be found, but it’s in the hinterlands— not Pennsylvania’s, but New York’s and New England’s. The Tanglewood Festival honored Elliot Carter’s centennial in July with a series of programs devoted to him. Carter is not only the dean of American composers, but still very active. Verdi, Richard Strauss, Vaughan Williams and Stravinsky all composed significant music into their 80s, which was taken for a wonder in their times. What shall we say then of Carter, who surprises us with music that continues to explore, prickle and delight even after ten decades? Hats off to Tanglewood, and of course to Mr. Carter himself.

A college president, too

Leon Botstein, meanwhile, brought Moscow to the Hudson with a ten-concert series on Prokofiev and his contemporaries at Bard College, just concluded. Botstein, a superb musicologist and an able musician (and, in his spare time, president of Bard since 1975), specializes in neglected repertory of the 19th and 20th Centuries, of which he has unearthed a good deal.

A contrarian might argue that, with so few opportunities for present-day composers to get a hearing, one can well bypass works by Chausson or Ries on which history seems to have passed judgment. But that’s a false distinction; we need all the good music we can get, and as broad a sense of the tradition that has brought us to the present as possible. Botstein does us a service we would certainly be the poorer without. Call this the anti-Mostly Mozart festival.

From enfant terrible to Romantic

Prokofiev’s career was unique. He was raised in late Tsarist Russia, emigrated to the West shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, and then returned to spend the last two decades of his life in Stalin’s Soviet Union, dying in 1953 on the same day as the dictator. He was an enfant terrible early on but later a neoclassicist and finally, in the Stalin years, a Romantic. In the first two of these stages Prokofiev was a follower of Stravinsky; his 1914 ballet Ala and Lolly (better known in the music drawn from it for the Scythian Suite) was the first work to reflect the influence of The Rite of Spring, and his Classical Symphony (1917) actually trumped Stravinsky, who had written only short pieces but no major work in his neoclassical style to that point. The two men parted company entirely, of course, when Prokofiev turned to the Romantic idiom of his later years.

As Prokofiev experimented with every major style of his day other than serialism, he had a very wide circle of musical acquaintance. Botstein got a fair amount of French music into his festival, as well as the work of Russian emigrés, and even George Gershwin and Cole Porter. This is an eclectic mix indeed, but then, the post-World War I years were the first of the international style that has mostly dominated Western music since; and Prokofiev, with his busy concertizing, got around probably more than anyone else.

Revising for the worse

The concert I heard included two late, Soviet-era scores: the suite from Prokofiev’s comic opera The Duenna (a.k.a. Betrothal in a Monastery), and the Sinfonia Concertante for Cello and Orchestra, a reworking of one of Prokofiev’s last Paris works, the Cello Concerto, Op. 58. The former is a very engaging work, not top-drawer Prokofiev but certainly undeserving of its neglect. The latter is among the half-dozen finest works for cello and orchestra in the 20th Century.

Prokofiev spent a good part of his last years revising earlier works, notably the Fourth Symphony and the Fifth Piano Sonata, generally for the worse. The Sinfonia Concertante is the exception. It doesn’t displace the original concerto on which it was based, but it has certainly replaced it in the repertory. The Israeli cellist Gavriel Lipkind performed it with dexterity and aplomb (it requires both), though of course the work will always belong to its dedicatee, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Botstein’s tempos rather dragged here.

The prolific Miaskovsky

These works bracketed two symphonies, the Sixteenth and the Thirteenth, by Nikolai Miaskovsky, an elder contemporary of Prokofiev’s and the closest friend of his later years. Miaskovsky wrote 27 symphonies, the kind of feat that suggests mediocrity, but in fact he’s a composer of considerable interest. Chronologically and stylistically, Miaskovsky occupies the symphonic niche between Scriabin and Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev: essentially a late Romantic with some modernist accents. His most strongly marked quality is an original and distinguished lyricism that’s often affecting.

Botstein remarked jokingly to the audience that Miaskovsky had never been played before in America and probably would never be played again, but he evidently forgot his own performance of the Sixth Symphony in New York several seasons ago, arguably Miaskovsky’s finest work and one that (despite a problematic finale) takes no back seat to some far better-known repertory pieces.

The Sixteenth Symphony is a public work in that it commemorates a tragic mid-air collision. Prokofiev overpraised it in a review, and Botstein apparently reads oppositional messages about Stalin into it that I don’t hear, but there is an impressive, elegiac slow movement.

The composer called it ‘strange’

The Thirteenth Symphony, a terse, one-movement work, is quite another matter, though. Miaskovsky himself described it as “solipsistic,” “pessimistic," and “strange,” which recalls Vaughan Williams’ comment about his own Fourth Symphony: “I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant to say.” The musical material is jagged and spiky, and the mood is deeply somber. It evokes, for me, the Miaskovsky Tenth, likewise a tightly argued, single-movement composition. If it were an American work from 1933— say, like Aaron Copland’s symphony of that year— it would occupy a significant place in our musicology, and I would gladly hear it performed again. Botstein’s American Symphony Orchestra played it with precision and commitment.

Don’t get me wrong about Mozart— the more of him, quite literally, the merrier. But it doesn’t suffice to leave vast tracts of the worthwhile repertory to discography while gracing only the certified masterpieces with live performances. We need to hear the fuller context of our tradition— and, of course, if we decently funded the arts we could do so. That’s a story for another day. But in the meantime, thanks to Botstein and his colleagues for shining light in a few dark corners, at least.