How Prokofiev proves he’s the best
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
I once had an all-night argument with Valery Gergiev about 20th century Russian composers. This was before Gergiev had become a propaganda tool of the Putin regime and his mind was still open to contradiction. I took what was then the mainstream position that Stravinsky was an unassailable genius, a position which, 30 years later, I have abandoned. Gergiev argued vehemently for Prokofiev, first for the operas which he was then reviving at the Mariinsky but even more forcefully for the seven symphonies, of which only the first and fifth had caught on. The rest, from that day to this, are hardly performed and I felt unqualified to judge their merits….
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
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