Young Russia

Serge Prokofieff, famed Russian modernist composer, has a scunner against Boston. Seven years ago, when his Fourth Symphony was premiered there, supercilious Bostonians pooh-poohed it, critics even dared to suggest that it was written in too much of a hurry. Last week blond, lumbering Prokofieff, guest-conducting the Boston Symphony, evened the score. "If the public in Boston cannot understand my serious music," said irate Composer Prokofieff, "I'm going to give them simple things." One of the simple things was his Peter and the Wolf, a musical fairy tale written to teach the various sounds of the orchestral instruments.

Bostonians who found Peter and the Wolf lots of fun were not alone in not knowing when to applaud music by contemporary Russians. Two years ago, Soviet Russia officially banned "Leftist" tendencies in music and art, held up James Joyce's polyperverse novel Ulysses, "written in English that can hardly be understood by Englishmen," as a celebrated example. Two years before that, Nazi Germany had banned exactly the same types of modernistic art as kulturbolschewistisch.

Most prominent victim of the Soviet ban was Dmitri Shostakovich, Soviet composer-laureate, whose tricky, sensational opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, introduced to the U. S. in 1935 (TIME, Feb. 11, 1935), had become the rage of Manhattan's intellectuals. Lady Macbeth of Mzensk was withdrawn from Soviet theatres.* Composer Shostakovich's subsequent ballet, The Limpid Stream, was also withdrawn after a panning by Moscow critics, and his Fourth Symphony was suppressed without a performance. For two years Shostakovich was in the doghouse.

Meanwhile, Soviet musical authorities, who had suddenly developed a tremendous respect for such romantic 19th-Century composers as Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov (both previously considered horrible examples of bourgeois sentimentality), got themselves a new approved list of less modernistic composers. First to shine among the new group was young Ivan Dzerzhinsky, whose melodious, folk-song-inspired opera And Quiet Flows the Don was contrasted favorably with that "muddle of sound, raucous cacophony and lascivious naturalism," Lady Macbeth. Most talented of the new group was shy, sandy-haired, 24-year-old Tykon Krennikov, whose deep, contemplative First Symphony was hailed by critics at its Manhattan premiere last year as one of the finest contemporary works of its kind. Also basking in official favor were long-nosed Dmitri Kabalevsky, Caucasus-born Lev Knipper, and aging, conservative Nicolas Miaskovsky, who was composing symphonies long before the Old Bolsheviks were dry behind the ears.

Last November, wiry, bespectacled Shostakovich, who had been laboring desperately but unsuccessfully to get in line with the new romantic-minded order, finally turned the trick in his Fifth Symphony and was promptly restored to grace. This symphony, described by mollified Moscow critics as "a work of great depth and emotional wealth," will be given its U. S. premiere over the air next week by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Conductor Artur Rodzinski.

Meanwhile 46-year-old Composer Prokofieff, who left Russia after the revolution of 1917 settled eventually with Composer Stravinsky, Impresario Diaghilev and other artistic emigres in Paris, has also seen the light. Once a brilliant musical bad boy who followed the primitivist (Scythian Suite) and satiric, neo-classical (Classical Symphony) vogues of the sophisticated ballet music, he has today forsworn his "smart" past, moved back to the Soviet Union, and embarked on an expedition into what he describes as the "deeper realms of music." Compositions of his "deeper" period already include a Russian Overture and a ballet, Romeo and Juliet, excerpts of which were performed last week in Boston.

*The Soviet Government supports talented Soviet composers, but controls all rights to the performance and publication of their compositions, issues an approved few of these compositions to the outside world.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.