By Stuart Mitchner
A few days ago I listened to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and have been buoyed by the joyous ambiance of this 13 minutes of music ever since. In the colorful image accompanying the piece on YouTube, Prokofiev is lounging on a cane chair surrounded by greenery, one leg casually balanced on the other, one arm slung over the back of the chair, holding a score he’s been working on, a pencil in his other hand. He’s dressed casually in a dark brown zippered jacket, and he’s looking good, touches of color in his cheeks, no glasses, in his thirties or forties, prime of life, and as in other photos from this period (see his wikipedia page), he looks more like a Russian David Bowie than the generic image of the severe, bespectacled composer.
Finding Out More
Hoping to find out more about this music, I drove over to Labyrinth Books and bought Claude Samuel’s Prokofiev (Calder and Boyars 1971). Next I plunged into my email archive and came up with a ten-year-old message from an old college friend telling me he’s been “on a Prokofiev kick” and thinks of him, fondly, as “Rachmaninoff Gone Mad.” After praising “his terrific and terrifically showy, piano music,” my friend says, point blank: “I hate the Classical Symphony.” more
