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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Prokofiev - Back in the USSR

Composer of the Week: Prokofiev - Back in the USSR: Episode 5: Denunciation and Decline

Prokofiev - Back in the USSR

Episode 5

Episode 5: Denunciation and Decline

Denunciation and Decline

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Prokofiev - Back in the USSR, Denunciation and Decline

Prokofiev's decline and death after his music was denounced by the state in the late 1940s

Donald Macleod focuses on Prokofiev's tragic decline and death after his music was denounced by the Soviet state at the end of the 1940s.

Donald Macleod explores Prokofiev's tragic decline and death after his music was denounced by the state at the end of the 1940s.

Sergei Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin; there were no flowers left for his funeral. It was the grimly ironic end to a return to his Russian motherland that had begun in triumph in the mid-1930s and descended terrifyingly quickly into a fight for his life, in the face of the state's purges of artists and intellectuals. This week, Donald Macleod explores a host of masterpieces - including Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, War and Peace, Alexander Nevsky and the Sixth Symphony - leading to Prokofiev's final, devastating denunciation by the cultural commissars in 1948, a blow from which his music and health would never recover.

With the war over, and two glittering Stalin Prizes under his belt, things at last seemed to be looking up for Prokofiev. But his world would come crashing down with his infamous denunciation by the state in 1948 - along with Shostakovich, Khachaturian and others - at the height of the USSR's post-war cultural purges. Donald Macleod explores how a devastated Prokofiev never really recovered - either musically or personally - as he set to writing a series of colourless state works that found favour with neither the critics or the authorities. Prokofiev would die in 1953, reportedly just an hour before Stalin.

Prokofiev: II. Andante sognando (Piano Sonata no 8)
Boris Giltburg, piano

Prokofiev: I. Allegro moderato (Symphony no 6)
Bergen Symphony Orchestra
Andrew Litton, conductor

Prokofiev: III. Andante; IV. Allegrissimo (Violin Sonata No 1 in F minor, Op 80)
Alina Ibragimova, violin
Steven Osborne, piano

Prokofiev: Dove of Peace (On Guard For Peace)
Boys Choir of Glinka College
St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra
Yuri Temirkanov, conductor

Prokofiev: Zdravitsa (Hail to Stalin)
Russian State Symphony Orchestra
Valeri Polyansky, conductor.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod on Prokofiev's triumphant - and ultimately tragic - return to the USSR

Donald Macleod explores Prokofiev's triumphant - and ultimately tragic - return to the USSR. With works such as Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, War and Peace, Alexander Nevsky and Symphony No 6

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