Shostakovich’s oratorio hails Stalin’s plans for the afforestation of the Russian steppe; Prokofiev’s is a militant plea for peace. More importantly, both works are chilling exemplifiers of the rigorous late-Stalinist thought-control in which the two composers, like their comrades in the other arts, were forced to be complicit. Not surprisingly the two pieces have much in common in content and construction. Almost identical in length, each features children’s voices as symbols of innocence and post-war regeneration, each celebrates the heroes of Stalingrad, and each apostrophizes the wise leadership of Stalin. Each won its composer a lucrative Stalin Prize and contributed to the process of rehabilitation after the 1948 Zhdanov crackdown.
The recipe for success ran (implicitly) as follows: bottle the most easily recognizable elements of your style, water them down with repetitions, adulterate them with intonations borrowed from the Red-Army-style mass song, and market the results as evidence of your new Party-inspired wisdom. Shostakovich, the more experienced reader of the runes, made a better job of it, in terms not only of official acceptability but also of producing a memorable and stirring piece of music (much as I hate to use such phrases in connection with such nauseating projects). He never let the mask of conformity slip, though I do wonder if he wasn’t sniggering behind his hand when he penned the appalling kitsch of his sixth movement (‘Happy nightingales are singing’). I’d also like to think he got some small pleasure from knowing that he was beating the orthodox Soviet cantata-mongers at their own game, though I suspect that Galina Ustvolskaya’s memories of encountering him after the premiere in an alcoholic stupor are a more accurate pointer to his state of mind. As in his public pronouncements, Prokofiev was less willing to abase himself, but as a result he produced a less convincing fudge. The time-servers in the Soviet establishment astutely recognized that when they awarded him the Stalin prize second class as opposed to Shostakovich’s first class.
Quite what Yuri Temirkanov and his St Petersburg musicians felt about performing such music in post-communist Russia is anybody’s guess. I note only that with the exception of Gennadi Bezzubenko’s wonderfully rich-toned bass, the performances seem a little half-hearted. A somewhat anaemic recording, with the chorus disappointingly indistinct, reinforces that impression. The text given in the booklet for the last two movements of the Prokofiev is rather different from that sung; but performance and booklet for the Shostakovich quite rightly restore the name of Stalin, which was bowdlerized out of the score in Vols. 29 and 30 of the Complete Edition and out of the otherwise greatly superior Moscow recording on Russian Disc.
Bearing in mind the process of mass ideological brain-washing behind these pieces, this is a historically important and aesthetically chilling issue.'