Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas: A Guide for the Listener and the Performer
by Boris Berman
from Yale University Press
Boris Berman, renowned concert pianist and teacher, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Sergei Prokofiev. In this book, he draws on his intimate knowledge of Prokofiev’s work to guide music lovers and pianists through the composer’s nine piano sonatas. These cherished works, composed between 1910 and 1951, are today considered an indispensable part of the repertoire of every serious concert pianist.
The book, written with a deep appreciation of Prokofiev’s style and creativity, looks at the sonatas within the context of Prokofiev’s complete oeuvre. For each sonata, Berman provides general information about the work and a discussion of the composition’s details and features, and in a section entitled “Master Class” he offers suggestions for interpretation and specific advice for performing. Berman also corrects for the first time various misprints in published scores and includes a helpful glossary of musical terms.
Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography
by Harlow Robinson
from Northeastern
The prolific creator of such classic popular works as Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, and Cinderella, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was one of the most important and influential composers of the twentieth century.
Drawing on unprecedented access to previously unknown or unavailable Russian-language sources, including extensive archival material, Harlow Robinson traces Prokofiev's extraordinary life from the fairy-tale world of Czarist Russia, through his many years abroad in America and Europe, to his perlexing permanent return to Moscow in 1936 under the Soviet Regime. That Prokofiev died on the very day as Josef Stalin, his principal persecutor, was the final irony of his intense and enigmatic career.
Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A composer's memoir
Prokofiev--A Biography: From Russia to the West 1891-1935
by David Nice
from Yale University Press
Since 1991—the year that marked both the fall of the Soviet Union and the centenary of Sergey Prokofiev’s birth—a new assessment of the renowned composer’s life and work has become both possible and necessary. In this engrossing book, David Nice draws on a remarkable range of previously unexamined sources to present that reassessment. The book follows Prokofiev’s personal and musical progression from his childhood on a Ukrainian country estate to the years he spent traveling in America and Europe as an acclaimed interpreter of his own works. Nice sheds new light on Prokofiev’s early years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, his departure from Russia in 1918 for what he thought would be a short tour of America, and his marriage and family relationships. He considers the music of Prokofiev’s years in the west (long dismissed by Soviet musicologists as decadent work weakened by the composer’s absence from the motherland), moving from the lyricism of his St Petersburg years to the fresh simplicity of his early Soviet scores. Nice also examines the complex reasons which led Prokofiev to move his family to the Soviet Union in 1936. A second volume will cover Prokofiev’s life from this period to his death in 1953.
Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1907-1914: Prodigious Youth
by Sergey Prokofiev
from Cornell University Press
Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.
Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. In candid and lively prose, he records the all-too-normal preoccupations of a young man making his way in the brilliant social and artistic circles of the prewar Russian capital. Virtually every artist and musician of note appears in these pages, in penetrating and not always flattering vignettes. Prokofiev's main subject, however, is music, its creation and its performance. He reveals his own developing aesthetic principles through his assessments of the works of others, even as he composes such early masterpieces as the First and Second Piano Concertos, The Ugly Duckling, the First Violin Concerto, and the Classical Symphony.
An inexhaustibly rich portrait of a vibrant artistic culture on the edge of war and revolution, Prokofiev's Diaries are both a dramatic illumination of a great composer's creativity and an indispensable contribution to our understanding of musical modernism. They constitute an essential and entertaining reference for all lovers of Prokofiev's music.
The Music of Sergei Prokofiev (Composers of the Twentieth Century Serie)
by Neil Minturn
from Yale University Press
In this first comprehensive analytical study of the music of Sergei Prokofiev, Minturn sets the prolific Russian composer`s work in historical, cultural, and biographical contexts. He examines a variety of Prokofiev`s compositions for piano, orchestra, chamber ensembles, and voice from a sophisticated theoretical point of view and finds throughout these works an enduring central theme of the interplay between tradition and innovation.
Peter and the Wolf
by Carin Dewhirst
from MetroBooks (NY)
Retells the orchestral fairy tale of the boy who, ignoring his grandfather's warnings, proceeds to capture a wolf. Includes information about the piece and related activities.
Prokofiev's Ballets for Diaghilev
by Stephen D. Press
from Ashgate Publishing
Selected Letters Of Sergei Prokofiev
from Northeastern
One of the most important and influential composers of the twentieth century, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was also a prolific and gifted writer. Besides producing diaries, short stories, dramas, reviews, and the libretti for his own operas, Prokofiev conducted lively and frequent correspondence with family friends, classmates, and notable cultural figures in the Soviet Union and abroad.
This engaging volume collects for the first time in English the most representative and enlightening of Prokofiev's letters, including some previously suppressed missives that have never before been published. Expertly translated and annotated by Harlow Robinson, the correspondence presented here covers Prokofiev's earliest years at St. Petersburg Conservatory, his extensive worldwide travels, and his return to Moscow. Among the correspondents are childhood friend Vera Alpers, harpist Eleonora Damskaya, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, theatrical director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Soviet critic Boris Asafiev, composers Vernon Duke and Nikolai Miaskovsky, soprano Nina Koshetz, musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky, violinist Jascha Heifetz, conductor Serge Koussevitsky, and film director Sergei Eisenstein.
Prokofiev vividly describes, often with dramatic flair and a quirky sense of humor, concerts, performances, his compositions, political events, and meetings with other musicians and composers. His observations are peppered with musical gossip as well as eccentric, original, and disarmingly apolitical insights. Like his music, the writing style is laconic, brisk and tart, full of energy.
Taken together, the letters provide a cultural and musical history unequaled in the correspondence of any other modern composer. This indispensable edition will shed new light on Prokofiev's misunderstood life and career, illuminate his creative processes and aesthetic principles, and introduce his exceptional literary talents to those already captivated by his musical genius.
Prokofiew (Monografie popularne)
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