Sergei Prokofiev Research Articles

Review of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Choreographed by Christopher Gable and Massimo Moricone to Sergei Prokofiev’s Score for Northern Ballet) at the Sheffield Lyceum Theatre, 4 April 2024

Review of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Choreographed by Christopher Gable and Massimo Moricone to Sergei Prokofiev’s Score for Northern Ballet) at the Sheffield Lyceum Theatre, 4 April 2024

Музыка советской эпохи как часть публичной истории (по материалам сайта Arzamas)

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of Soviet music as presented in the Russian‐language educational project Arzamas (2015–2023). Posted in the public domain of the Internet, the materials on the Arzamas website fully fit into the interdisciplinary discourse of public history. In this article, the author selects and from the perspective of cultural recycling analyses an array of materials of the Soviet period presented on the website: from folk and Soviet mass songs, gypsy and classical romance (including romance in cinema) to jazz, symphony, ballet, and break dance. The article traces how the authors of different genre materials interpret selected works and the historical and cultural profiles of their creators from the point of view of postmodernity. Special attention is paid to the principles according to which the website forms a musical image of the Soviet period for the modern audience (which statistically consists of Millennials and, if taking into account the Arzamas Children’s Room, the next two generations — Z and Alpha). The author of this article makes a conclusion that what is meant by Soviet music in the Arzamas project is compositions created from the 1920s to the late 1960s (early 1970s) and listened to by different social groups. The dominant type of a musical composition is a song in various modifications. Soviet music (mostly non-academic) is treated as an integral part of the country’s history which emotionally accurately reflects political and cultural changes. In such a context academic music becomes a peripheral phenomenon: only two composers are highlighted — Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich — but shown as victims of the Soviet system.

“New Ballet Criticism” (1993–2003) About “Soviet” Ballet: Forms of Cultural Recycling

In post-Soviet Russia ballet criticism, similar to opera criticism, has an almost 30-year-old history, but the period perceived as the brightest and most significant is the first period, spanning the 1990s and the early part of the first decade of the 21st century. For this New Ballet Criticism (as it has been labelled by Vadim Gaevsky), as a part of New Russian Music Criticism (as defined by Olga Manulkina and Pavel Gershenzon), a number of features have become normative: provocative styles and titles, a demythologization of works and of choreographers, the use of comparisons with mass culture in narratives, and ironic subtext. Similar to opera, political discourse has become important in ballet receptions of that time. Reviews of Soviet-era ballet productions (as well as other types of performance) often refer to the main elements of Soviet mass art — Soviet films, as well as symbols of the totalitarian culture, such as sculpture and ideological materials. The styles and headlines exploit numerous Sovietisms that are familiar and recognizable by the audience. Just like in opera reviews, the recent “Soviet” element in ballet receptions is synthesized with Soviet mass culture and fashionable trends in the country via the cult of Western cinema and the influence of domestic and foreign literary, scholarly and epistolary texts. But unlike opera criticism, ballet narratives clearly record the diversity of genres of “Soviet” ballet (ranking Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich among them); ballets since 1961 have been interpreted as a transformation of the “Soviet” element under the influence of George Balanchine’s choreography; the concept of “Soviet choreography” also implies the unreachable, for example, in the embodiment of heroic moods and the creation of mass scenes. Four forms of cultural recycling in ballet receptions are identified: recycling, recycling à la ballet, double recycling and quasi-recycling.

Leaving Home: Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”

ABSTRACT This article will explore some of the ways I conceptualize music as it pertains to the concept of “home,” and specifically here, about leaving home. Using composer Sergei Prokofiev’s music in his well-known beloved composition, Peter and the Wolf, I will illustrate the gradual integration and consolidation of identity in the eponymous character, Peter, as he left his childhood garden home. Thus, the analysis of music itself as a primary source of psychoanalytic data is the distinctive method of analysis that I bring to my interdisciplinary explorations. Prokofiev’s masterpiece Peter and the Wolf pertains to the following overdetermined themes: Music and psychoanalytic concepts hold enduring value as each informs and enriches the other. Music serves as an important entry into affect and unconscious processes. Music and psychoanalytic principles are relevant both inside and beyond the concert hall and consulting room and contribute to a nuanced understanding of our inner lives.

ARTISTIC PATHOS OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN SERGEI PROKOFIEV’S PIANO CONCERTOS: PERFORMANCE AND PEDAGOGICAL INTERPRETATION

Sergei Prokofiev’s piano concertos became a significant contribution to the world art. The innovation of the musical language, high technical complexity, original form designs, the complex nature of musical images cause a number of performing and pedagogical problems. Thus, the Second Concerto combines the reliance on the classical traditions and the national Russian flavour. The richness of the content and the variety of techniques give rise to the Прикладные исследования, технологии 135 virtuoso character of the piano part. Within the pedagogical process, it is necessary to orient students to the full coverage of the form and expressiveness of performance. The purpose of the paper is to reveal the artistic and performing features of Prokofiev’s concertos and suggest some pedagogical approaches to studying them in the piano class. Disclosing the significance of the piano works by S. Prokofiev in the world musical culture, revealing the innovativeness of the composer’s musical language and finding a way to master it in the piano class, defining the main pedagogical approaches to technical mastery of Prokofiev’s piano concertos are the main tasks of the paper.

Reappraising Prokofiev's Operas

Sergei Prokofiev's operatic career exhibits a multitude of exceptional successes and failures, political and cultural idiosyncrasies and compromises, and bold convictions and uncertainties. Prokofiev considered himself an opera composer and showed his affinity for it from an early age, completing his first opera by age nine and continuing his work in the art form for the remainder of his life and career. Each opera takes on vastly different subjects, topics and time periods, evidence of his diverse selection of libretto sources. For his mature works, Prokofiev adapted literary works from Russia's nineteenth-century greats (Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy), a Russian twentieth-century symbolist author (Bryusov) and two socialist-realist authors (Katayev and Polevoy). He adapted two other operas from the eighteenth century with Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comic opera libretto for The Duenna and Carlo Gozzi's fiaba L'amore delle tre melarance.

Сталинградская битва в отечественной и зарубежной музыке

In this article the authors analyze the artistic elaboration by various composers of the Battle of Stalingrad as a decisive episode of history. Examination is made of the aspects of conceptual solutions, genre-related and stylistic features, the peculiarities of thematicism (included the derived variety), as well as dramaturgy. These questions are posed in connection with the material of music by Russian composers (in the first section) and those from other countries (in the second section). In the present issue of the journal (where the first section is presented) a broad panorama of works by composers pertaining to several generations from Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich to Sergei Slonimsky, Tikhon Khrennikov-junior and the composers from the city on the Volga. Along with well-known works, oeuvres which have not received scholarly elaboration have ended up being within the sphere of research attention. Characterization is given to images of interpretation of the theme in the various spheres of genre: the cantata-oratorio, theatrical, symphonic, etc. It is noted that despite all the differences of the artistic merits of the compositions, the semantics of the Stalingrad victory inherits the traditions and highest spiritual intentions of Russian culture — assertions of peacefulness as a philosophical-ethical conception of existence.

Музыка Сергея Прокофьева к кинофильму «Пиковая дама» Михаила Ромма

Among the artists-creators who have turned to the musical-theatrical or musical-cinematographic interpretation of Alexander Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and thereby risked to enter into a dialogue, or even into polemics with Piotr Tchaikovsky’s immortal opera, Sergei Prokofiev presents a striking example. His artistic tandem with cinema producer Mikhail Romm was formed in 1936, however, the film The Queen of Spades for various reasons turned out to be inaccessible to the viewing audience. The music to the film project, which failed to be realized, was almost completed by the composer and has for many years attracted conductors and film producers. Within the focus of the scholarly interest of the author of the present article is the story of the creation of the music for the film, as well as its analysis based on art studies. This work of the composer turns out to be simultaneously quite organic for the master’s legacy, possessing the traits of his style, and quite original, when compared to other works connected with Pushkin’s immortal novelette. Research experience has made it possible to compensate for the prior perceptions of Prokofiev as a cinematic composer, and also to make a certain contribution in the questions connected with the dialogue of the arts and, more broadly, with the cultural dialogue. Developing itself within the framework of musical Pushkiniana, the sought dialogue overcomes space and time, initiating the invisible connection between past, present and future.

ВОКАЛЬНАЯ СКАЗКА С. ПРОКОФЬЕВА «ГАДКИЙ УТЕНОК»: НА СТЫКЕ РОМАНСА И ОПЕРЫ

The article is devoted to one of Sergei Prokofiev’s most controversial works, the vocal fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling”, based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen (1915). The composer’s early experiments with vocals and instruments formed the foundation of his opera style and had a direct influence on his later works, in particular “The Gambler” (1916) and “War and Peace” (1941–1946). The peculiarities of the genre, form, and musical language of the opus have given researchers a number of questions, the answers to which continue to be sought. The article focuses on the problem of working with a primary source and its musical embodiment, which is characterized by a certain mixture of genre and stylistic. The analysis is placed in a biographical context, taking into account creative parallels and reliance on the traditions of predecessor composers. Based on the study of Prokofiev’s epistolary heritage, reviews of contemporaries and fundamental works of Russian researchers, the article reveals the features of the genre system, compositional structure, and musical vocabulary of the vocal fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling”. The specific method of intonation used in the work, which comes from the vocal tradition of Modest Mussorgsky, is also discussed, and the existence of a peculiar dialogue with the works of Maurice Ravel is denoted.

Философия Сергея Прокофьева

The aim of the paper is to present the philosophy of Sergei Prokofiev not only as a concentration of his creative experience, but also as a result of studying works by the great philosophers, I. Kant and A. Schopenhauer. Prokofiev distinguishes between a priori philosophy of music and a posteriori philosophy of music in his creative work. The first one is represented by thoughts about music (creative will); the second one is represented by musical works themselves (creative ideas). The scientific novelty of the research lies in considering Kant’s antinomies of pure reason as Prokofiev’s frame of reference in his life and creative work. Thus, the composer’s symphonic oeuvre develops as a chain of binary structures representing semantic antinomies, opposite judgments about reality correlated with each other as a “thesis” and an “antithesis”. As a result of the research, the author comes to the conclusion that Prokofiev’s symphonies, connected in pairs, capture the history of the first half of the XX century as a tragic rift of the world between the forces of good and evil, creation and destruction, freedom and cruel necessity.

Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev ed. by Dassia N. Posner, Kevin Bartig and Maria De Simone

Reviewed by: Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev ed. by Dassia N. Posner, Kevin Bartig and Maria De Simone Anna Muza THREE LOVES FOR THREE ORANGES: GOZZI, MEYERHOLD, PROKOFIEV. Edited by Dassia N. Posner and Kevin Bartig, with Maria De Simone. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021; pp. 460. The volume under review considers the whimsical comedy of three oranges as scripted, first, by Carlo Gozzi in eighteenth-century Venice; by Vsevolod Meyerhold in early twentieth-century St. Petersburg; and just a few years later by Sergei Prokofiev, whose opera is the best-known work of the three in the New World. An (equally) international collective of scholars offer erudite, insightful, and truly interdisciplinary readings of the dramatic texts, realized and unrealized performances, artistic controversies, and of a continuous creative absorption of ideas, styles, and techniques. The volume’s title is elegant yet unduly restrictive: In addition to the three titular artists, the book presents other seminal authors enamored of commedia dell’arte, such as German Romantics and Russian Symbolists, whose sensibilities and influences are specifically addressed in Natalya Baldyga’s and Vadim Shcherbakov’s contributions but resonate throughout the volume. Examining the pertinent theatrical, cultural, and critical history of the Italian masks, the book also brings to light some of the less famous yet remarkable figures (such as the theatre scholar and practitioner Konstantin Miklashevsky featured in Laurence Senelick’s essay, and the artist Boris Anisfeld in John E. Bowlt’s). As a result, the scholarly volume dedicated to a series of extremely fluid theatrical texts and events is as sparkling and fascinating as the delightful source material itself. The main elements of the whimsical plot retained by all of its co-creators concern a prince first cursed by an inability to laugh and then sent on a romantic pursuit of three oranges, which eventually prove to enclose three fair maidens, one of whom becomes the prince’s bride. Each of the book’s three parts— “The Fiaba,” “The Divertissement,” and “The Opera”—contains a translation of a verbal script produced by Gozzi in Italian (1772), by Meyerhold in Russian (1913), and by Prokofiev in French (1919). The English translations are done, respectively, by Maria De Simone, Dassia Posner (who has also participated in rendering the rhyming verse in Gozzi’s text), and Kevin Bartig. The editors-translators have meticulously examined and coordinated the scripts to preserve and reveal borrowings, correspondences, and emendations. The scholarly precision, historical sensitivity, and literary quality of the three translations are matched by a theatrical thrust: all (re)create the vivid atmosphere (I might say, ecology) of live, audience-oriented theatre. As Posner observes in her sharp overview of the collection’s main goals and themes, the “fairy-tale manifestoes” by the three great artists are extremely relevant to our ongoing attempts to “rethink what is primary in stage performance” (3). The volume not only discusses but also invites stage practice. All translated texts are stage-ready: framed and enhanced by the research, they can be used in all kinds of training and studio work, interdisciplinary courses, and full-scale productions. Gozzi’s “Reflective Analysis of the Fairy Tale ‘The Love of Three Oranges,’” written eleven years after its actual stage performance, is striking in its montage of scripted parts and “self-referential commentary,” which includes, in De Simone’s words, “descriptions of mise-en-scène, audience reactions, [End Page 414] and Gozzi’s explanations of his formal experiments” (6). “Analysis” provides a conceptual trajectory for the collection not only as the origin of the itinerant plot, but also as a template for daring generic innovations, assertive self-awareness, and metatheatricality. The historical and histrionic background on Venetian theatre (provided by Alberto Benuscelli, Guiletta Bazoli, and Domenico Pietropaolo) is also helpful in building an arch from the past to the future, and vice versa. That commedia dell’arte inspired Meyerhold, Prokofiev, and other modernists is well-known, yet the essays in Three Loves reach beyond the triviality of “everything new is the well-forgotten old.” Ted Emery’s chapter, aptly titled “Carlo Gozzi’s Reactionary Imagination,” underscores Gozzi’s fierce anti-Enlightenment stance staged in his “imaginary fairy-tale worlds” (109), which...

Лейтмотив смеха в опере Сергея Прокофьева «Любовь к трем апельсинам»

Along with the musical leitmotifs, Sergei Prokofiev’s opera The Love for Three Oranges has important literary leitmotifs. This can be explained by the following. Prokofiev was working on music and libretto practically simultaneously (as he himself put it, “you write a phrase, and there comes a musical idea”). Musical and literary leitmotifs have a very sophisticated interaction and an equal contribution to the dramaturgy. The main literary leitmotif is laughter in all possible forms: the word “laughter”, its derivatives and synonyms in different parts of speech along with the sounds of laughter (“ha-ha”, etc.). The laughter in Prokofiev’s opera has a sacramental meaning. Soviet folklorist V. Propp wrote a study called On the Comic and Laughter, where he points out that laughter in folklore means an entry into life, whereas its absence or taboo represents death. From this point of view, the Prince in The Love for Three Oranges is not only sick—he is actually dead, so the only cure to bring him back to life is laughter. In the second half of the opera the leitmotif of laughter is replaced with the leitmotif of three oranges. That is because the fairytale consists of two independent pieces, and the Prince’s laughter serves as an impetus to launch the main plot of looking for the oranges. Two pieces of the opera form a whole by its key intrigue: a constant confrontation of “the helpers” and “the villains” who, according to their functions (specified by Propp), interfere with the Prince’s fate.

The Cultural Canon of Russian Music in the Series “The Lives of Wonderful People” (From the End of the 19th to the First Decades of the 21st Century)

The subject of the study is the modeling and transformation of the cultural canon in the field of academic music by the example of the series “The Lives of Wonderful People.” The main sources used were biographies of Russian and Soviet composers, published between 1892 and 2019. Analysis of these texts is carried out within the framework of receptive research; cultural-historical and historical-genetic methods, and the theory of cultural recycling are applied. Florenty Pavlenkov’s narratives about Russian composers have already become an important part of the formation of the musical picture of the world among the readership of the Russian Silver Age. These biographies (of Mikhail Glinka, Alexander Serov and Alexander Dargomyzhsky) account for almost a third of the total number of books about musicians in the series, whereas one single author – Sergei Bazunov – forms the narrative canon. In the Soviet period, with the change of the mass reader orientation and the presence of rigid ideological attitudes, a different cultural canon of selected composers was elaborated. In period of Stalin they were Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Piotr Tchaikovsky. In the second half of the 20th century (before 1991), the following composers were added to the list: Dmitri Bortnyansky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Sergei Prokofiev. Subsequent political changes have entailed the transformation and rebranding of the biographical canon of this series. In the post-Soviet era, there has been a rapid expansion of the circle of musical names: both composers of the beginning of the 20th century (Alexander Scriabin) and from the Soviet period (Isaak Dunaevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Tikhon Khrennikov, and Valery Gavrilin) have been included there. A recycling of biographical narratives of the Soviet era (for example, Tchaikovsky and Glinka) has been carried out. Along with the composers, an array of biographies of those artistic activists without whom Russian music of the Silver Age would not have taken place – philanthropists, producers and performers (for example, Sergei Diaghilev, Savva Mamontov, and Fyodor Chaliapin) – has also emerged. Keywords: biographies of composers, the series “The Lives of Wonderful People,” cultural recycling, the Soviet canon

The image of femme fatale in Sergei Prokofiev’s opera of the 1910s – 1920s

The comprehensive analysis of Sergei Prokofiev’s operas “Maddalena”, “The Gambler”, “The Fiery Angel” reveals the peculiarities of personification of the image of the protagonist as femme fatale (Maddalena, Polina, Renata). Despite heightened interest to this topic, this article is first to view the listed operas from such perspective, which defines the scientific novelty. The fact that the libretto of these works was created by the composer himself can be considered as testimony that S. Prokofiev deeply intertwines with the psychology and personality traits of his heroes. The composer depict “femme fatal” a specific type of personality that combines self-worth and spiritual pursuit, desire to manipulate others and natural talent, no sense of guilt, and realization of self in another person. The use of comparative-historical, musical-culturological, and theoretical-analytical methods allow tracing correlation between the opera plot and their life context of creation, finding differences and commonalities in the means of expressing the image of femme fatal, and indicating the evolution and universality of the composer’s way of thinking on the early stage of creation. Attention is given to the synthesis of the principles of symbolist, romantic, realistic and expressionist musical drama, which S. Prokofiev uses in the opera under review.

Guillaumier , Christina The Operas of Sergei Prokofiev (review)

REVIEWS 755 Part 5 on cultural crossovers is the most variegated part of this stimulating collection, including Tat´iana Chernova who describes the triumph of Medtner’s Romantic Sonata in Britain, after he had settled there, also offering ideas as to why it was so successful. Elena Petrushanskaia finds the influence of English music in the poetry of Iosif Brodskii and, with less certainty, in the music of Shostakovich, despite his ‘dialogue’ with Britten. Kseniia Suponitskaia discusses the image of Ophelia in the works of Valerii Gavrilin. Ol´ga Krasnogorova explores the interpretation of British piano music, especially that of Thomas Adès and Brian Ferneyhough. A more conventional composer, John Taverner, dedicated to Princess Elizabeth Fedorovna Romanova ‘full of grace’ a musical prayer in 2002, which is analysed in the article by Elena Miklukho. A Bulgarian scholar Liudmil Dimitrov tries to analyse Pushkin’s ‘Pir vo vremia chumy’ as more than a translation of John Wilson’s ‘City of the Plague’, perhaps fancifully finding a code in the name Walsingham. Finally may be mentioned Elena Savitskaia’s piece on Russian music in the works of British rock bands, including The Nice (Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor), Renaissance (marginally, Rimskii-Korsakov’s Shekherazade) and, particularly, Emerson, Lake and Palmer (Musorgskii’s Pictures at an Exhibition). There is much to enjoy as well as to learn in this rich collection of articles, reminiscences and interviews, which undoubtedly deserves a place in all serious libraries of both Russia and Britain. London Arnold McMillin Guillaumier, Christina. The Operas of Sergei Prokofiev. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2020. xii + 286 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. Synopses. Bibliography. Index. £40.00; £19.99 (e-book). Christina Guillaumier’s The Operas of Sergei Prokofiev is a comprehensive, up-to-date and scholarly monograph based on extensive archival and bibliographical research. Guillaumier has consulted major Prokof´ev biographies, articles, operatic monographs (Polevoi, 1949; Klimovitskii, 1961; Tarakanov, 1996; Ruch´evskaia, 2010; Savkina, 2015; Seinen, 2019), PhD theses (McAllister, 1970; Petchenina, 2006; Landis, 2007; Ermolaeva, 2018), Prokof´ev’s Diaries, unpublished correspondence and the surviving autograph manuscripts. Guillaumier uniquely traces Prokof´ev’s complete operatic oeuvre, from juvenile works, both unfinished and completed, to major operas and largely unknown uncompleted operatic projects from late in the composer’s life (Epilogue). The book is well structured with a wealth of musical examples and offers a balanced text of historical and contextual information, musical SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 756 analyses and discussion of Prokof´ev’s operatic ideal, aesthetics and influences. According to Guillaumier, her intention is to shed light into Prokof´ev’s ‘stylistic and aesthetic decisions, his changing compositional style, and his continual re-evaluation of his own idiom’ (p. 1). This aim is well communicated throughout book, and, though it offers no overall conclusions, the evolution of Prokof´ev’s operatic ideal is well presented and merits the reader’s attention. The book’s chronological structure, with its cogently written chapters, offers an overview of Prokof´ev’s compositional growth: from the musical gestures of his earliest piano works and first attempts at orchestration in Maddalena, to the extensive use of declamation in The Gambler and The Fiery Angel, exploration of characterization through visual images and harmonic language in The Love for Three Oranges, to exploration of libretto adaption and lyricism in Prokof´ev’s Soviet operas. Guillaumier traces several of Prokof´ev’s operatic ‘gestures’ from the composer’s shorter juvenile compositions for piano, in which he uses ‘pianistic figurations and flourishes, repeated ostinato notes and chords, dramatic tremolos, long chromatic lines, and a broken-chord bass’ (p. 15). The musical gestures are presented in connection to plot, dramatic pacing and characterization. For example, ‘the ostinato is used to control the rhythm of the events […]; it often holds entire sections and sustains episodes’ (p. 64), while chromatism and tritones are often associated with evil characters (e.g. Renata in The Fiery Angel). Declamation, theatrical rhythm, dramatic pacing and scenographic plasticity are the main elements that, according to Guillaumier, constitute Prokof´ev’s operatic ideal. Prokof´ev’s preference for declamation, avoidance of arias and emphasis on theatrical acting in The Gambler were...

매튜 본의 Romeo + Juliet에 나타난 미메시스의 불안정성: 앙상블 장면의 미학적 영향을 중심으로

Matthew Bourne’s Romeo + Juliet (2019) is a Millennial restaging of William Shakespeare’s tale of the star-crossed lovers in movement. Set to Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet score, the dance musical reinvents a long-standing familial feud into a social rift between repulsively abusive adults and unjustly persecuted adolescents. It is a drama of young people living in the near future who desperately desire freedom and affection, while addressing issues facing youth today such as mental health and sexual violence. A notable aspect of the production is the young casts. Bourne’s decision to engage young talent was supported by his belief that a story about youth is “no better told than by the young,” and the team recruited from across 13 cities 80 local boys and girls who, being part of the UK’s young population, are familiar with the issues that the show is concerned with. Bourne intended to overwhelm his patrons with teenage bursts of energy released from the body, leading them to wonder about incarcerated youth in the danced narrative and, eventually, the well-being of the juvenile dancers they are witnessing onstage. Bourne’s celebration of youthful vigor thus provides new images of the body on stage that goes beyond mere representation. The infectious youthful energy articulated by dancing youngsters highlight an aesthetic experience similar to that of the postdramatic body which, according to Marvin Carlson (2015), troubles the stability of the mimetic. Specifically, its body-based disavowal of illustrations is most clearly visible in the ensemble dances where the body becomes its own message. Movement in Romeo + Juliet encourages further investigation into the brutal condition of younger generations, and this echo of reflection is, as Hans-Thies Lehmann (1999) underscores, “an implied telos even in the theatre of pure presence that refuses meaning.” Thus, Romeo + Juliet, as a variant of book musical, introduces a function of dance that is different from the six functions of dance in musical theatre that Liza Gennaro and Stacy Wolf identifies (2015). Bourne’s ensemble dance challenges the distinction between theatre world and everyday life, and empowers the audience to become the author of their theatrical experience.

Творчество Р.К. Щедрина

The previous issues of the journal featured publications of lectures about such outstanding 20th century Russian composers as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofi ev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian and Georgy Sviridov. This series is continued with a lecture about the music of Rodion Shchedrin. Following the portions of the lecture which deal with the early and middle periods of the composer’s music, the drama and even the tragic quality of his world perception and their overcoming. the present situation acquired maximal tension upon Shchedrin’s turning to the most acute problem for the romantic consciousness — the problem of interactions of personality and its surroundings, especially in the event of their confrontation. During the lecture’s exposition fragments of musical compositions are offered with their recommended performances, in their sum providing a perception of the most substantial sides of Shchedrin’s musical legacy.

Творчество А.Г. Шнитке

The previous issues of the journal featured publications of lectures about such outstanding 20th century Russian composers as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofi ev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, Georgy Sviridov, and Rodion Shchedrin. This series is being continued with a lecture about the music of Alfred G. Schnittke. The fi rst part of the lecture (“National ‘Fermentations’ and Early Works”) examines the questions of the genesis of the composer’s personality and the initial stage of his artistic formation with a drastic reorientation from a traditional style to avant-garde experiment. The second part (“The Middle Period”) is devoted to Schnittke’s explorations in the direction of contacts with wide audiences, which went along various lines of democratization of his artistic approach. The conclusive part (“The Late Style”) is directed towards the composer’s immense contribution to the formation of the stylistic realities of the Postmodern aesthetics. During the course of the lecture’s exposition fragments of musical compositions are offered with recommended performances of them, in their sum providing a perception of the most substantial sides of Alfred G. Schnittke’s musical output.

Постскриптум. Ещё несколько композиторских имён

In the previous lectures, which made up the cycle “Classics of Russian Music of the 20th Century”, the works of Sergei Rachmaninov, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Dmitry Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, Georgy Sviridov, Rodion Shchedrin and Alfred Schnittke were examined. Let us supplement this panorama with two final lectures: the first is intended to extend the range of composers’ names, the second will be devoted to an overview of 20th century music with an outlet into the universal space. As it is well-known, since the time of Peter the Great, who established St. Petersburg, two capitals coexisted in Russia, each of which possessed its own face and style, among other things, in the creation of music. By the end of the 19th century, two compositional schools had developed: the St. Petersburg school, the core of which was the “Mighty Handful”, and the Moscow school, headed by Piotr Tchaikovsky. During the 20th century, these schools continued their fruitful interaction. Among the names presented in the main sections of my lectures, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Shostakovich, Sviridov began their activities in St. Petersburg- Petrograd-Leningrad, and later they became Muscovites (except for Stravinsky, who lived abroad from the early 1910s). In the second half of the 20th century, the leaders of the musical process in Russia were the Moscow composers Rodion Shchedrin and Alfred Schnittke, along with whom many other names can be mentioned, including Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina and Vladimir Martynov. Representatives of the Leningrad school continued to make a significant contribution to the treasury of Russian music. The following short overviews of the works of Sergei Slonimsky and Valery Gavrilin will testify to this. In addition to the two capitals, composers from a number of other cities in Russia, primarily, those with conservatories, have worked tirelessly in the field of the art of music, which has significantly expanded the scale of the panorama of the musical art in our country — the creative heritage of Elena Gokhman is cited as a characteristic example.

«Балет в балете»: творческие поиски современных хореографов

By the example of ballet performances of the recent decade: Ilya Demutsky’s “A Hero of Our Time” at the Bolshoi Theater of Russia (Yuri Posokhov, choreographer; Kirill Serebrennikov, producer and scenographer, 2015) and Sergei Prokofiev’s “Cinderella” produced by Alexei Miroshnichenko (the Perm Theater of Opera and Ballet) examination is made of the problematic aspects of the use of the stage technique of “ballet within a ballet,” as well as their artistic motivation within the framework of the established traditions of the Russian and the world choreographic art. The problem lies in the fact that particularly the stage of the Bolshoi Theater of Russia most frequently became the venue for historical experiments in ballet, and latter, for the reevaluation of the artistic validity of the Soviet ballets of the first half of the 20th century. The parallels and differences are shown between the various productions of the ballet “The Nutcracker,” namely, those by John Neumeier and Graham Murphy, where the main acting protagonist turned out to be the choreographer – the demiurge and the creator of his own ballet work. By the example of the Perm Ballet (in its production of “Cinderella”) the artistic misstep is revealed of the transference of the emotional-poetic content of the ballet score into the social domain, as well as the artificiality of the parallels between the spiritual worlds of Lermontov’s protagonists with the language of the art of choreography in the 19th century (“A Hero of our Time”). It is shown that the rich musical content of Prokofiev’s score and its interpretation by Theodor Kurentzis carries a metaphysical character, and not a social one, as in the production of Miroshnichenko, and for this reason consciously impoverishes the chosen conception of the “ballet within a ballet.” Keywords: The Ballet Theater of Russia, stage motivations, “a ballet within a ballet,” the creative work of Alexei Miroshnichenko, the creative work of Yuri Posokhov, the theatrical productions of Kirill Serebrennikov.