Stony reception

Peter Bourne, a ‘life member of the Serge Prokofiev Association’ and no relation (I assume) of our hero St. Matthew, e-mailed me to say he had found his way to the blog. Although he ‘read it with great interest and enjoyment’, he found the tone of my Stone Flower appraisal rather negative, even if he agreed with most of my criticisms (Mr Bourne, I’ll spare you my views on the same company’s Nutcracker – let’s just leave it at the choice adjectives ‘incoherent’ and ‘routine’). Perhaps I should have started by making it clear that it could only be a good thing that someone, at last, should have fought for the right to choregraph more than anyone else in the UK has ever done of Prokofiev's full score. So thanks, first and foremost, to Michael Corder for making the attempt against the odds.

Mr Bourne thinks that the production would come closer to being a ‘genuinely popular ballet classic’ rather than a ‘near miss’ if they did what we wanted and reinstated the ‘Mistress of the Copper Mountain’ introduction. Would it be asking too much of the restive ballet audience to sit through Prokofiev’s Prologue before curtain up? It might mean a cut or two in the choreography, but that would surely be no bad thing. How about it, Corder and co?