As we reach the centenary year, Neeme Jarvi continues the Prokofievian odyssey on which he embarked in the mid-1980s with one of this master's most popular works, the Suite from Lieutenant Kije and one of his least known, the ballet The Tale of the Stone Flower. I enjoyed Lieutenant Kije in Jarvi's hands more than I have for a long time: he has the measure of its sense of fantasy and magic, as well as its festive spirit. His is a splendidly characterful performance which has the benefit of an excellent Chandos recording.
The Andante, Op. 50bis is a transcription for full strings of the middle movement of the First String Quartet (1930): the only previous recording I can recall was Rozhdestvensky's 1963 account (HMV Melodiya—nla). As its opus number implies, Autumnal sketch is an early work, dating from 1910, only a year after the First Piano Sonata, though Prokofiev subsequently revised it twice, in 1914 and 1934. Not surprisingly it finds his musical language not fully formed, though his imagination is rich. The shades of Rachmaninov hover and Prokofiev himself confessed that its inspiration could be traced to certain Rachmaninov works, namely The isle of the dead and the Second Symphony. It is scored for small orchestra (double woodwind plus bass clarinet, trumpet, four horns, harp and strings) and makes resourceful use of these forces. I have to say that I found this performance just a little less atmospheric than Rozhdestvensky's 1971 account (HMV—nla) and felt that it could have benefited from a slightly more leisurely tempo.
I saw The Tale of the Stone Flower, the last of Prokofiev's full-scale ballets, in Paris in the 1960s and thought its inspiration neither as fresh nor as seemingly inexhaustible as Cinderella or Romeo and Juliet. It is infrequently performed though it was running to packed houses in Moscow last autumn. Rozhdestvensky's complete 1975 recording of the score (HMV—nla) dispelled the impression that this was just Prokofiev on automatic pilot. The present suite, one of three Prokofiev fashioned from the work, contains some attractive and characteristic ideas (as in the Dance of the fiancee's girl-friends and the Scene and waltz of the diamonds), which improve on repetition, and left me wishing that Chandos had persuaded Neeme Jarvi to record a more generous selection, or even the whole ballet! Not top-drawer Prokofiev perhaps but well worth having all the same.'