Prokofiev, Bartok Interviews

(Via Jessica Duchen, British music writer and Korngold biographer.)

In this 1944 radio interview in English, Bela Bartok discusses the pieces in an upcoming recital by his wife. At this time, he was suffering from leukemia and had a little over a year to live. Bartok’s English is fluent, but his accent charmingly has a little Peter Lorre flavor (make that “Peter Lorre impersonator” flavor, since the real Lorre had an additional Viennese sound that Mel Blanc et al. missed.) Bartok speaks in some detail about forms and folk influences of these pieces.

And here’s a short video of Sergei Prokofiev playing the piano and talking about what he’s composing. The excerpt is from Scene 5 of his opera War and Peace, which had just had a partial concert performance in Leningrad. At that moment (the middle section of the waltz), Anatole Kuragin has been going after the engage Natasha, and he gets her alone to kiss her and hand her a love letter. The entire scene IS the waltz, except for Natasha’s interjections in her own musical style, which wane in strength as the scene goes on.

Courtesy of YouTube member bramley88: Prokofiev is asked: “Sergei Sergeevich, maybe you will tell our viewers about your work?”

He replies: “Well, right now I am working on a symphonic suite of waltzes, which will include three waltzes from Cinderella, two waltzes from the War and Peace, and one waltz from the movie score “Lermontov.” [War and Peace] has just been brilliantly produced in Leningrad, where the composer Cheshko (?) made an especially noteworthy appearance as a tenor, giving a superb performance in the role of Pierre Bezukhoff. Besides this suite, I am working on a sonata for violin and piano [no.1 in f minor], upon completion of which I will resume work on the sixth symphony, which I had started last year. I have just completed three suites from the Cinderella ballet and I am now turning the score over to copyists for writing the parts, so that most likely the suites will already be performed at the beginning of the fall season.”

The scene Prokofiev plays above is very astutely directed in this DVD by Francesca Zembello:

Prokofiev - War and Peace / Bertini, Gunn, Kit, Mamsirova, Gouriakova, Brubaker, Paris Opera starring Olga Gouriakova, Nathan Gunn, Robert Brubaker, Anatoli Kocherga, Yelena Obraztsova

John Adams Interview In Salon - Video

Kevin Berger of Salon has an interesting interview with John Adams in conjunction with the release of the composer’s autobiography, “Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life.” Read the transcript or watch the video (about 10 minutes).

Some interesting moments concern the inspiration Adams took from Wagner:

I was driving through the Sierras and I was listening to a cassette of “Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” from “Gotterdammerung.” This is sort of surprising because at that time I was deep into John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and doing a lot of electronic music.

I’d always been interested in orchestra music, having grown up with it, and I was suddenly just seized by the emotional tone of the music, the emotional sincerity of the music. It suddenly illuminated me and made me realize how much of the avant-garde that I’d been involved in had become dead as far as feeling was concerned. The one thing Cage really forbade was expression of feelings. He was the world’s most lovely, gentle person in his human interactions. But when it came to art, things were absolutely cold. And so much of avant-garde music was.

Here we have this great tradition of jazz and pop music in America, where feeling is everything. If you think of late Coltrane, like “A Love Supreme,” it’s just this 40-minute exhalation of raw feeling. I thought to myself, “Why is it that contemporary classical music has to be devoid of feeling?” By hearing Wagner and realizing what had been lost, I think I suddenly very vaguely saw my future. (John Adams)

Other topics include the composer’s annoyance with the meme that he writes “CNN operas,” and a response to accusations of anti-Semitism in “The Death of Klinghoffer:”

I invite them to meditate on the libretto and the music. Because most people who’ve spent serious time with it, and not come with enormous prejudicial baggage, are moved by the human feeling in the work, and the feeling extends to both the Palestinians and the Jews. You can see why it’s so hard to solve these problems like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because people are so completely locked into their positions.

In full disclosure I must tell you that I’m only superficially familiar with the operas of Adams and not a huge fan of minimalism in general. I hope John and David will have a spare moment to comment.