The Fringe has been up and at 'em for a week; tonight the Edinburgh International Festival joins the fray with its customarily blazing opening concert.
For his penultimate programme as EIF director, Sir Jonathan Mills has chosen a theme exploring arts and technology and the interplay thereof. And when it comes to great composers who grappled with the creative potential of new media, few did so with more artistic and political success than Sergei Prokofiev.
"Film is a highly contemporary art form," Prokofiev wrote in the early 1940s. "It offers completely new and interesting opportunities to composers that must be exploited." The composer lived by his own advice and proved his theory true several times over.
Prokofiev was a chameleon, a wearer of musical masks, who (unlike Stravinsky, whose music sounds like Stravinsky no matter what guise it took) could and did fully shape-shift through multiple styles.
There is the formal elegance of his Classical Symphony, the cheeky satire of his opera The Love Of Three Oranges, the brash clatter of his Scythian Suite. His piano concertos alone encompass a dazzling spectrum of sounds, and tonight the Russian whizz-kid Daniil Trifonov - who wowed his Queen's Hall audience at last year's Festival - plays the exuberant Third with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Then there is the barnstorming patriotism of Alexander Nevsky. Prokofiev and his wife Lina had moved back from Europe to the Soviet Union in 1936 for reasons that are not entirely clear. Stravinsky had unequivocal opinions on the matter: "Prokofiev followed the bitch goddess success, nothing else. He had had no luck in the United States and Europe for several years, whereas his visits to Russia became a triumphal parade. […] He was politically naïve, and by the time he fully understood the situation over there, it was too late."
That Prokofiev was after success is quite possible, but politically naïve he was not. Even though his precise politics remain opaque, there is no doubt he knew exactly what kind of music he needed to write to flatter the regime.
Alexander Nevsky was his third film score (after Lieutenant Kijé in 1933 and Pique Dame in 1936) and his first collaboration with Sergei Eisenstein (his second, Ivan The Terrible, was completed in the mid-1940s). The historical epic tells of Nevsky, a 13th century hero who defeated crusading Teutonic knights during a famous battle on the ice.
Given the Soviet Union's tetchy relations with Germany at the time, the film was a great political success and earned Eisenstein the Order Of Lenin.
Artistically it was a triumph, too, thanks to its unprecedented integration of music and cinematography. Nowadays the visuals look laughably dated, but to experience the film with the music performed live is still fantastically exciting.
Tonight's performance won't show the film, which is a great missed opportunity. Instead, Valery Gergiev conducts the concert cantata Prokofiev put together after the film was released in 1939 - a version whose dramatic sequences do not entirely add up without the visuals.
Joining the RSNO is the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, whose chorus master, Christopher Bell, describes Prokofiev's rousing music as "relatively straight-forward to sing". What's tricky, he says, is the Russian. "One or two Russian sounds are completely foreign to English speakers, so we have had to work closely with a language coach so Gergiev won't burst out laughing when he hears us."
The chorus act as both Russians peasants and invading crusaders (who, in a Prokofien jab at Stravinsky, sing Latin texts from his Symphony Of Psalms). The movements flit through various moods: reminiscent, fearful, warmongering. But mostly they are triumphal. "It needs to sound nice and rich," says Bell, "so we recruited a few extra low basses this year to bolster the low Russian Cs. But, above all, it needs to be sung with great gusto. The sound should be nothing short of thrilling."
The Edinburgh International Festival opens tonight at the Usher Hall.
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