War And Peace - Prokofiev

Starring: Kirov Opera Orchestra And Choir, Valery Gergiev Original UK Premiere: 1991 Dvd Release: 1st March, 2004 Number Of Discs: 2 Format: Box set, PAL, Subtitled, Region 2 Encoding Subtitled In: English, French, German, Spanish

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War & Peace is an epic novel of Russian history & society by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869, which tells the story of Russia during the Napoleonic Era. The Russian words for peace & world are homonyms, so the novels title can also be translated as War & the World. War & Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth & age. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics did not consider it as such. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense. The novel tells the story of five aristocratic families & the entanglement of their personal lives with the history of 1805 – 1813, specifically Napoleons invasion of Russia. the onward roll of history determines happiness & tragedy alike.

Now, why would anyone settle for Les Misérables, when they could havethe real thing, Prokofievs War & Peace, instead? One of lifesmysteries, if you ask me. There is nothing in Miz that W&P doesnthave to an even more staggering degree, pathos, spectacle, drama,entertainment ... melody!

Prokofiev originally wanted to concentrate his efforts on the central lovestory from Tolstoys monumental work, but Stalin, who pestered Prokofievabout the opera until both died on the exact same day in 1953, insisted onthe Russian people being depicted in a grandiose, patriotic fashion, andeven carved out a role that was supposed to be a portrait of himself,Stalin as brilliant military strategist.

And it works. Brilliantly even. The choruses have a raw, primeval powerthat stays with you, & the largest second portion of the work, War isa succession of war imagery, of people caught in the middle of it, of theprice that people play as pawns to the powers-that-be, & it never failsto impress.

Certainly not in Graham Vicks magnificent staging for Kirov in 1991. Thesets arent gigantic in the old-fashioned Russian sense, but they areevocative as well as huge, lighting is superb, & Valery Gergiev does awonderful job of blending the tragedy of War with the subtler emotions ofPeace. His reading is dynamic, but never overstresses its points.

The singers are definitive in roles that are among the best ever writtenin any opera. There is simply not one banal role, they are allmulti-layered, the cowardly Pierre, the pacifist who finds in himself anunseemly attraction to the atrocities of war until he gets a little tooclose for comfort, the heroine Natalya who is a bit quick when it comes tosacrificing her real love & whose righteousness is not an attractivefeature, the hero Prince Andrey who is a dandy & whose sudden conversioninto monogamy & marital love never rings quite true ... Not to mentionNapoléon, the monster whose armies are threatening Moscow, but justlisten: his music is warm & enveloping, clearly sympathetic. Prochina asNatalya, Gergalov as Andrey, Gregoriam as Pierre, there is no end to thewonders of this production.

Valery Gergiev is a Russian conductor associated with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera & the Mariinski Theatre. Gergiev was born in Moscow on 2 May 1953 to Ossetian parents & raised in Vladikavkaz in their native North Ossetia in the Caucasus. No child prodigy, he began to learn the piano at secondary school & then went to St. Petersburg to study at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1978, he became assistant conductor at the Kirov Opera under Yuri Temirkanov, where he made his debut conducting Sergei Prokofiev s War & Peace. He was chief conductor of the Armenian State Orchestra from 1981 until 1985. In 1991, Gergiev conducted a western European opera company for the first time when he conducted the Bavarian State Opera in a performance of Modest Mussorgsky s Boris Godunov in Munich & in the same year made his American debut, performing War & Peace with the San Francisco Opera. Since then he has conducted both operatic & orchestral repertoire across the world. Gergiev is associated with numerous music festivals.

Editors Choice: Valery Gergiev Conducts The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Valery Gergiev In Rehearsal, Mazeppa, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, War And Peace, Valery Gergiev, Shostakovich, View DVDology

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