It takes a bit of getting used to: those primitive images, that emaciated soundtrack (remember Gone with the Wind dates from a year later), now laced with music in pristine stereo. Prokofiev's score was always the best thing about Alexander Nevsky. This was never great Eisenstein (indeed, alongside Battleship Potemkin and Ivan I'd call it laughable), but a made to order piece of nationalistic cheer-leading dressed up as historical drama. There, I've said it. But, my goodness, that score: where would Walton's Agincourt charge be without it?
John Goberman, Executive Producer and William D. Brohn (distinguished Broadway orchestrator and the score's arranger and reconstructer) have done the film a great service here. For Brohn, it was a case of arduously taking down what he could hear from the soundtrack and marrying it to the only score source in existence – that of the concert-hall Cantata. But thanks to his sharp ears and good taste, we can now watch and listen without embarrassment. Remember the field organist in the German camp – the hooded Peter Cushing look-alike? We now hear a field organ, not a piano. And remember the cartoonish trombone glissando (who wouldn't?) as the last German slides beneath the ice? That has gone too, thank heavens. As for the ice-breaking percussion solos, they no longer sound like a heated kitchen dispute.
So much for the video, then (and I presume we'll be able to see this restored edition in theatres, too). But what about plain listening? That's another story. RCA bill the album ''First Complete Recording''. That it is. But let's be clear: Prokofiev incorporated much of his music into the familiar Cantata. Such other material as there was amounted to little more than underscoring ballast – and repetition, lots of repetition. To come straight to the point: this is not the best way to enjoy Nevsky's exhilarating score. Once you've heard the Cantata (an organic whole fashioned from so much fragmentation), you'll surely be frustrated by the singular lack of musical continuity. It's as if the concert vision we know and love has been shuffled like a pack of cards. Without the supporting imagery, there are simply too many musical non sequiturs – good material badly stitched.
You have only to compare ''The Crusaders in Pskov'' from the concert version with its equivalent material from the film. Most of it is contained in two segments: ''Pskov in Flames'' and ''Death to the Blasphemer!''. But where the concert version makes eminently good musical sense, the film equivalents make none. It's one nasty jump-cut after another. It's music to fit. The celebrated ''Battle on the Ice'' comes in six inconsequential segments replete with crude battle effects from the soundtrack (those at the point where the Cantata explodes in the blood-curdling cries of the Teutonic hordes). Goberman's notes speak of the attack on the Germans being twice as long in the film as in the Cantata (all on account of repetition, mind): one of the most effective 'builds' in the orchestral repertoire, he says. But to what purpose? Removed from both its film and musical context, a 'build' is all it is. No, listening to these tantalizing off-cuts after hearing what Prokofiev could, and did, make of them for the concert-hall is a bit like channel-hopping during your favourite TV programme.
But, that said, it's all very well done. At Prokofiev's tempos, of course. Yuri Temirkanov has no room for manoeuvre, which must have pulled against the grain somewhat (patently so, in one or two places), Yevgenia Gorokhovskaya is oddly balanced (for atmosphere, one presumes) in the middle distance of the battlefield for her heartfelt lament. Otherwise, clean sound, full of impact, though hardly the wide-screen spectacular that Chandos lay on for Jarvi (my preference among the Cantata recordings, 5/88). Movie buffs will want this. It is first-rate documentation. But as a musical record of Prokofiev's work on Nevsky, you must go for the Cantata. R1 '9506131'