Music: Prokofiev - Ivan The Terrible - MFSL [UDSACD 4003] Audiophile recording

About this recording:
From the standpoint of a developing composer, Prokofiev would seem to have picked the right time to leave Russia- six months after the 1917 Revolution, two weeks after his own 27th birthday- and the right time to return, in 1933. He not only profited by exposure to the West, but returned to a USSR in which many of the new regime's excessively harsh views on history, education and the arts had been somewhat softened. As Boris Schwarz observed in his invaluable book, Music and Music Life in Soviet Russia 1917-1970, "Soviet leaders became avowed nationalists. Patriotism was no longer limited to ride on the 'conquests of the Revolution' but was extended to include Russia's historic past. The entire concept and teaching of history was reversed. The views of Mikhail Pokrovsky, until his death in 1932 the leading historian, were discarded as a vulgarization of Marxism and a distortion of Russian history. The glory of Russia was restored, the tsars re¬evaluated including Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible."
One of Prokofiev's first projects after his voluntary repatriation in 1933 was the score for Andrei Feinzimmer's Lieutenant Kizheh. As a projected celebration of the 1937 centenary of the death of Pushkin, Prokofiev composed music for theater productions of Vevgey Onegin and Boris Godunov and a film of The Queen of Spades. As it happens, none of these works were produced. After another visit to the United States, he composed scores for six more films. Four of these -Lermontov, Tonya, Kotosvy, and Partisans in the Ukrainian Steppes- are either forgotten by now or simply unknown outside Russia. But the first and last are recognized as high points of Soviet film: Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, both directed by Sergei Eisenstein.
Prokofiev produced these assignments with a vigor and enthusiasm fired by an extraordinary perception of the medium's unique requirements. He was fortunate in working with a great director who recognized the important role music could play even the total absence of spoken words. It is singularly appropriate that it was Eisenstein who wrote the long introduction to Isreal Nestyev's "official" biography of Prokofiev published at the end of World Word II (before Prokofiev and Eisenstein were cited as major offenders in Andrei Zhdanv's infamous denunciations of various prominent Soviet artists).
In 1941, on request from "on high," Eisenstein prepared to undertake another historical-patriotic epic, and he again invited Prokofiev to collaborate with him. The project was Ivan Grozny ("Ivan the Terrible"); at the time neither Eisenstein nor Prokofiev could foresee the dimensions to which it would grow.
Ivan the Terrible became not one film, but two, its two parts produced in 1942 and 1945 respectively. Part I was Prokofiev's first major undertaking after the completion of his opera War and Peace, Part II followed the Fifth Symphony. The premier of Part I did not take place until 1946, and Part II was not shown to the public until five years after Prokofiev's death - a full decade after the death of Eisenstein. The two parts constitute not only a chronicle of events during one of the most dramatic periods in Russian History, but also a probing character study of the imposing figure behind those events.
Ivan, the first "Tsar of all the Russias" (his original title was that of Grand Duke of Muscovy, and as such he was known as Ivan IV), lived from 1529 to 1584. He became titular ruler at the age of four, and at seventeen proclaimed himself Tsar (the title, like the German word for emperor - Kaiser- is derived from the name Caesar). In the film he is portrayed not as the bloodthirsty tyrant his nickname suggests, but as a sorrowful and lonely man, betrayed by his friends, deprived of love, determined at all costs to weld and preserve a unified Russia under constant attack from abroad and even more damaging intrigues on the part of the treacherous boyars at home. Prokofiev summarizes the scope of the portrait in his article Working with Eisenstein-. "The first part of the film... portrays Ivan's youth. Ivan, loving husband, grieving at the bier of his beloved wife, Anastasia, who was poisoned by the boyars. Ivan, imperial statesman who, while struggling with enemies internal and external, successfully conducts military, international and administrative affairs. Ivan, the autocrat, committed to the sole aim of unifying the Russian territories into a whole, an empire."
In working on the two parts of Ivan the Terrible during the decisive years of the "great Patriotic War," Prokofiev enjoyed an even closer relationship with Eisenstein than they had in creating Alexander Nevsky, and he wrote with such drive that he produced more music than he could use in the films. The film score itself he designated Op. 116; it is not unlikely that he would have constructed a concert work from this material as he had done in the case of Nevsky, but he was otherwise occupied the last eight years of his life, composing his last two symphonies, the ballet The Stone Flower, the opera 77k Story of a Real Man (in both of which stage works he re-used themes from Ivan), the Cello Sonata and other new works, as well as revising certain earlier ones (e.g., the recasting of the Cello Concerto, Op. 58 for the young Rostropovich as the Symphony-Concerto, Op. 125). There was also a stronger deterrent, stronger than the pressure of work and stronger than the health problems the composer was experiencing in 1946, the year in which Part I of Ivan the Terrible was released. Andrei Zhdanov, the spokesman for the Central Committee of the Communist Party, mounted a series of attacks on prominent writers, poets and film-makers, in the course of which Eisenstein was destroyed.
Stalin himself, who had called for the production of Ivan the Terrible in the first place (evidently seeking to justify Ivan's character and deeds), was so displeased with Part II that he ordered it scrapped. Plans for a Part III were of course abandoned. Boris Schwarz summarizes the situation as follows:
"The reason for this criticism was Stalin's new approach to history, a glorification of Russia's past regardless of accuracy. The official condemnation read: 'Eisenstein exhibited ignorance of historical facts by portraying the progressive army of Oprichniki as a band of degenerates, similar to the American Ku Klux Klan, and Ivan the Terrible, a man of strong will and character, as weak and spineless, something like Hamlet.'"
"Eisenstein's spirit was broken; after making an abject confession - 'The sense of historical truth betrayed me' - he died less than two years later, in 1948, without having returned to work. The censured part of Ivan the Terrible was released in 1958, during Khrushchev's regime, and is now widely recognized as a cinematic masterpiece. Both parts of the film have musical scores by Prokofiev which escaped criticism."
But Prokofiev, who noted in his autobiography that "...with the death of...Eisenstein I consider my work in the cinema finished forever," did not escape criticism for his other works.
In the year of Eisenstein's death, Zhdanov issued his notorious condemnation of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and other leading Soviet composers, for their "formalism" and other offenses; Prokofiev was not to be fully "rehabilitated" until after his death, which, significantly, occurred the same day as Stalin's.
Following the belated but enthusiastic acceptance of both parts of Ivan the Terrible, Abram Stasevich (1907-1971), who had conducted the music for the soundtrack, undertook to assemble portions of the score into a concert work, as Prokofiev himself had done with Alexander Nevsky. Stasevich made use of some of the music that did not get into the films as well as what was actually used by Eisenstein; he drew from the film script to construct a part for a narrator (who at times, describes the action, at other times assumes the role of Ivan), and Lugovsky, who had been Prokofiev's collaborator in creating the Nevsky cantata, provided the words to be sung in the oratorio version of Ivan the Terrible. The work thus created received its first performance, under Stasevich's direction, in the Great Hall of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow on March 23, 1961, as part of a general celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the birth of the by then fully rehabilitated and greatly revered Prokofiev.
The first American performances of the oratorio, which apparently were the first outside the Soviet Union, were given by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra on March 29 and 30, 1968, Stasevich again conducting. The work was not performed again in this country until August 1977, when Leonard Slatkin conducted it in Grant Park, Chicago. The following March it was given by The Philadelphia Orchestra, in both Philadelphia and New York under Ricardo Muti. In the Saint Louis performance of March 1979 which preceded the present recording, elements of all three of the previous American presentations of Ivan the Terrible were brought together: the orchestra which had given the U.S. premiere, the conductor of the Chicago performance, and Claudine Carlson, the soloist in the Philadelphia Orchestra performance. Mr. Slatkin and Miss Carlson subsequently performed the oratorio together with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
The story told in the films may be summarized as follows: Against a background of treasonous boyars bartering the country's tributes to foreign powers, the 17-year old Ivan Vasilyevich, Grand Duke of Moscow since the age of four, proclaims himself the first Tsar of All the Russias, committing himself to wiping out the corruption perpetrated by the boyars, to unifying the country and building it into a world power. The boyars, who had poisoned Ivan's mother nine years earlier and often made him witness the torture of various individuals, work to stir up unrest after his accession, and persuade the Tartar fortress-city of Kazan to make war against Moscow (in the film an emissary from the Khan of Kazan presents Ivan with a dagger so that he may honorably end his own life), but Ivan takes Kazan in a brilliant siege. Later, during a serious illness, Ivan demands that the boyars swear loyalty to his son Dmitri as heir, but they refuse. During Ivan's absence from Moscow boyars poison his wife and propose a new Tsar in his place - the submissive simpleton Volodimir. (The "Song about the Beaver," No. 19 in the oratorio, is sung by Ivan's aunt Yefrosiniya. Volodimir's mother -in anticipation of her son's coronation. The aunt, one of the secret plotters, administers the poison to Tsaritsa Anastasia.) Ivan persuades Volodimir to dress in his own royal robes, and mistaken for Ivan himself, is stabbed to death by the plotters. The boyars' treachery moves Ivan to form his ruthless guard unit, the Oprichniki, and to withdraw to a monastery in the Alexandrov settlement to await the people's pleas for his return to Moscow. His strategy is successful, and "unified Russia gathers upon the bones of the enemy."
The sequence of the oratorio's 25 sections varies somewhat from the order in which they appear in the films, but covers the pivotal points cited by Prokofiev. T. Korganov. in his preface to the score, notes that these sections (originally numbered 1 through 25) form themselves into five-large "movements":
I. Prologue. Childhood of Ivan (Nos. 1-4)
II. Coronation. Wedding (Nos. 5-13)
III. The Siege and Storming of Kazan (Nos. 14-16)
IV. The Boyars' Plot (Nos. 14-16)
V. The Tsar's Men (Nos. 21-25)
"The dramatic core of all the music," Korganov wrote, "is the leitmotif of Ivan, which appears in the first bars of the Overture, permeates the most important sections of the work, and it brings it to a conclusion." While many of the gestures in this work are more broadly drawn than those in Alexander Nevsky, the oratorio relies more on subtlety and, in particular, irony than the earlier cantata. Much of the music for Ivan was written to create a striking contrast with what is shown on the screen.
While Prokofiev used only original themes in Alexander Nevsky (both the Crusaders' themes and the Russian folk¬songs are actually his own), he did make use of folk-song and other borrowed material for this score. In the "Oprichniki's Oath of Loyalty", listeners will recognize the old hymn God Preserve Thy People, which Tchaikovsky used in the opening and close of his 1812 Overture.

— RICHARD FREED
Notes taken from the original 1979 Vox box release.

Technical information:
This majestic and colorful music continues to challenge conductors, arrangers and engineers to this day. Leonard Slatkin made two major revisions to the Stasevich oratorio, one before the recording and one after. A few years earlier while in Paris, the conductor had discovered a Prokofiev-penned polonaise that, while not part of the film score, seemed to work perfectly within this suite. The second revision concerned that of the narrator.
Slatkin had performed the piece live for the first time some sixteen months prior to this recording in March of 1979 and once again immediately preceding the three-day recording session at Saint Louis' Powell Hall. Working with engineers Marc Aubort and Joanna Nickrenz, the decision was made to record the orchestra, the bells and the narrator separately. Ten microphones were used, including two for ambiance in the 14th row, twelve seats apart, and facing away from the stage. In retrospect Aubort comments, "I'd probably use fewer microphones today." To get the proper definition, certain musicians were directed to sit further apart than in concert. The chorus, placed behind the orchestra, included the featured vocal soloists in their logical location for a more natural ensemble sound captured by three microphones. The bells were taped on a separate 4-track machine and manually synchronized. Instead of performing the entire piece several times and editing, Slatkin chose to record and review section by section.
The narration, noticeably absent here, was ably handled by bass Arnold Voketaitis (who would also perform masterfully in Lieutenant /(/ye from the same sessions). Slatkin felt that for the recording, the narration detracted from the impact of the music. The original Eisenstein film had not been referenced in any way so we have an epic work that must stand on its own as pure music. With this in mind, some minor editing was handled by Aubort with either Slatkin's instruction or final approval. Having worked on over a dozen albums together, Slatkin and the Elite Recordings team had a trusting relationship that resulted in this definitive recording of one of Prokofiev's true masterpieces.

Acknowledgements:
Mastered by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab on The GAIN 2 System by Paul Stubblebine.
Digital editing and QC by Shawn R. Britton
Musical Supervision originally by Joanna Nickrenz and Marc J. Aubort.
Engineering by Elite Recordings. N.Y.C.
Surround Series packaging by Rodney J. Dugan.

Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab gratefully acknowledges and thanks these individuals and companies for their technical support and expertise: Tim de Paravicini, Edmund Meitner, Pass Labs, Silverline Audio, Sound Application, EgglestonWorks. Clearaudio, Aesthetix. Stax Electrostatic, LINN & Z-Systems

Tracks list:
Leonard Slatkin and The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra & Chorus:
Sergei Prokofiev: IVAN THE TERRIBLE Op. 116

01. Overture and Chorus 03:25
02. March of the Young Ivan; The board Expance of the Sea 03:55
03. I'll Be the Tsar!; God is Glorified; Long Live our Tsar!; The Sea 03:10
04. Simpleton; The White Swan; Glorification; The White Swan 07:00
05. One the Bones of Our Enemies; The Tartars 01:57
06. The Cannoneers; To Kazan! 12:06
07. Ivan Pleads with the Boyars 07:22
08. Yefrosinya and Anastasia; Song About the Beaver; Ivan at the Coffin of Anastasia; The Choir of the Oprichniks; The Oath of the Oprichniks 16:37
09. The Song of Fyodor Basmanov; The Dance of the Oprichniks 04:15
10. Polonaise 01:32
11. Finale 04:08

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