Some of the Op. 104 folk-songs were included on a Vishnevskaya recital for Philips some years ago, and way back in the days of mono LP, Maria Kurenko made a memorable record of the Akhmatova settings, Op. 27 (Capitol), but otherwise Prokofiev's songs have been largely ignored by the gramophone. While there have been whole LPs devoted to the songs of Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov and even Cui, I can't recall having seen (let alone heard) a substantial offering of Prokofiev. Yet his contribution to the genre, as this issue shows, though small in quantity (they number no more than about 40 excluding folk-song arrangements) was not negligible in quality.
Prokofiev himself described the Akhmatova settings, of 1916 as a kind of relaxation after his labours on The Gambler and the Scythian Suite earlier in the year, and they persuaded his critics who had thought of him as an enfant terrible that he could, after all, write lyrical music. In his sleeve-note Noel Goodwin reminds us that they reflect the romanticism of Scriabin, but there is much French influence, particularly Ravel in the third, ''Thoughts of the sunlight'', and Stravinsky in ''The grey-eyed king''. In any event they are quite beautiful. Next on Side 1 come the Three Romances, Op. 73, to words of Pushkin, written at the time of the Pushkin centenary (1936). He had embarked, among other things, on incidental music to Onegin, and these settings must surely be numbered among his finest songs. Nestyev reminds us in his study (Oxford: 1960) that Miaskovsky once called Prokofiev the Pushkin of music, referring to ''his tremendous emotional restraint, his ability to sheathe the most powerful feeling in a stately suit of armour''. In these settings, the last songs he wrote of any importance, you can recognize the Prokofiev of the Second Violin Sonata: they are full of the wry harmonic sleights of hand that are so characteristic of his musical speech.
Faced with the two songs of Op. 9 in a quiz, I doubt whether many music-lovers would place them as Prokofiev. They are vaguely impressionist in feeling though the first, ''There are other planets'' to words by Balmont, is the more imaginative. Its companion, ''The drifting boat'' has some relatively conventional piano writing describing the raging sea. Otherwise the piano writing is thoroughly personal and nowhere more so than in the Op. 36 Balmont songs. I find it difficult to understand Nestyev's dismissal of these as ''gloomy and despondent in mood... possessing elements of the over-refined chromatic style of French impressionism and traces of the florid, oriental primitivism of Gaugin—features not at all consonant with his own true style''. I don't dispute that these stylistic elements are there but the songs are powerful rather than gloomy, and full of resourceful and imaginative touches. Dedicated to the Spanish singer Lina Llubera, who later became Prokofiev's wife, they come from the period of Chout and the Third Piano Concerto and have something of the boldness of his music of the early 1920s.
So far as I can judge, the American soprano, Carole Farley proves far more successful here than LS found in Poulenc's La voix humaine (Andante AD72405, 6/84—subsequently reissued on Chandos CD CHAN8331). She responds to the different moods and character of these poems and encompasses a rather wide range of colour and tone. She observes dynamic markings scrupulously (I cannot speak for the first of the Op. 9 songs, which is omitted from the 1968 Russian edition I have consulted). The accompanying of Arkady Aronov is highly sensitive and perceptive: his playing is a joy throughout. The recording was made at The Maltings, Snape, and as one has come to expect from this source, is eminently truthful. A rewarding issue of rare and valuable repertoire.'