Complete Opera
Gabriel Bacquier, Jean-Luc Viala, Hélène Perraguin, Vincent Le Texier, Georges Gautier, Didier Henry and Gregory Reinhart; Lyon Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Kent Nagano
Virgin VCD7 91084-2, 2 CDs
This recording won Gramophone’s 1989 Opera Award, and it remains an easy recommendation. Nagano treats Prokofiev’s deliberately anti-Romantic score as fast, hard-edged musical theater. The rhythms snap, the colors glare, and the orchestra responds brilliantly, although the more violent passages occasionally become aggressive for their own sake.
The French-speaking cast understands that these characters are grotesques rather than conventional operatic personalities. Bacquier, Viala, Gautier and their colleagues throw themselves into the work’s absurdity without making it merely silly. The recording cannot reproduce the production’s visual lunacy, but it preserves more of the theatrical momentum than one might expect. This is still one of the opera’s essential recordings.
Orchestral Suites
Scottish National Orchestra; Neeme Järvi
Chandos CHAN 8729
Listeners who find the complete opera difficult to follow without the stage action may be happier with Prokofiev’s six-movement orchestral suite. Järvi drives the famous March and Scherzo with enormous energy, and the Scottish National Orchestra plays the music with appropriately rude humor. “Entertainingly thrashed out” describes it rather well.
The generous program also contains the suites from Chout and Le Pas d’acier. Järvi is especially convincing in the latter, where the orchestra’s hard metallic attack suits Prokofiev’s mechanized Soviet spectacle. The Chandos recording is bold and immediate. It cannot replace Nagano’s complete opera, but as an hour of concentrated, high-impact Prokofiev, it may receive more frequent play.
