While the Seventh was put on disc almost immediately after its composition, the Second was among the last of Prokofiev's symphonies to reach the gramophone (under the baton of Charles Bruck who also recorded The Fiery Angel). The Second has a pretty high decibel quotient and comes from his years in Paris, where it was first given by Koussevitzky to whom it is dedicated. It belongs to what one might call his 'windowbreaking period' and its first movement calls to mind Prokofiev's own words about his ballet, Le Pas d'Acier, written the following year (''men working with hammers and axes, revolving fly-wheels and transmissions and flashing light signals, workers, speeches by commissars and so on'')! The whole work was apparently modelled on Beethoven Op. 111, and its second movement, like that of the Beethoven sonata, is a set of variations. The latter is of extraordinary imaginative richness—indeed Prokofiev at his most inspired. In later years he felt misgivings about the piece and had planned to overhaul it after he had finished revising the Fourth. These doubts were presumably fuelled by the dismal artistic climate of the post-war years and his depressed state following his illness in 1945. The arrest of his first wife in 1948, the sustained onslaught to which he was subjected at the time of the Zhdanov affair, and the death of friends such as Eisenstein, must have taken their toll and served to undermine his spirits and confidence.
All this, and in particular the cool reception of the Sixth Symphony serves to explain the clarity and directness of the Seventh. (Apparently at a meeting in 1951 Prokofiev insistently asked colleagues, ''But isn't the music too simple?''.) Its ideas are certainly more balletic than symphonic, and there are childlike touches (the idea on oboe and bells at the end of the exposition of the first movement) and the waltz-like themes in the scherzo that suggest the fairy-like world of Cinderella. After all, the work was commissioned by the Children's Division of Moscow Radio who asked for ''a simple symphony for young listeners''. I can't say that Seiji Ozawa conveys much sense of fairy-tale enchantment: he is often rather matter-of-fact, setting greater store by firm rhythmic grip and clarity of texture than atmosphere. Mind you, if you think, as I did, that the opening of the second movement is too slow, Ozawa is in fact closer to the metronome marking (dotted minim=48) than Malko (CfP) or other rivals. But the opening of the finale (and for, that matter, so much else) is sprightly and intelligent rather than captivating—which it surely must be. Ozawa, incidentally, chooses the original and not the variant ending so that the piece ends on a darker note.
The Second Symphony is also pretty literal though in the second movement Ozawa generates some sense of atmosphere and magic; of course, he has the inestimable good fortune of having an incomparable orchestra at his command. A small point: the individual variations are not given separate bands as they are in the Chandos set. The recording is well-detailed but full justice is not done to the Berlin Philharmonic string tone; there is not enough air round them and the gloriously light sheen we know from their concert appearances (and from other recordings) becomes a bit hard-edged above the stave. Nor is the recording the product of a natural concert-hall balance with a good back-to-front perspective: the woodwind are not recessed, indeed the listener appears to be suspended at times above them. The timpani (in the first movement of No. 7) sounds very dry. I would not recommend this in preference to the rival accounts listed above: Jarvi in both symphonies and Malko in No. 7 (his 1956 recording holds up remarkably well alongside the newcomer) or—with some reservations about the performance but none about the sound—Previn on Philips.'