7 November, 1917 and Prokofiev

Tomorrow will be Revolution Day on BBC Radio 3 - it's the actual anniversary of 'Oktyabr', Russia in those days having a calendar which was 13 days behind the one operating in the west. I've scripted a selection of what I think are very vivid excerpts from Prokofiev's diary for 1917, editing down ruthlessly if regretfully to fit five three-minute sequences which will pop up during the day - don't know when exactly - read by Sam West. I hugely admire Anthony Phillips' three-volume labour of love - not only has he translated everything, but the footnotes are a literary marvel in themselves - but as I was going about excerpting it struck me that he didn't always stick to the pith of Prokofiev's laconic style.

So I translated myself, indebted to his lead, and the work took me in to the thick of February Petrograd, where Prokofiev's curiosity led him around the seemingly random heart of the action around Liteiny and Nevsky Prospekts, Palace Square and the Fontanka Canal during the first Revolution of the year. He spends five pages meticulously detailing the movements of people, soldiers, Cossacks and revolutionaries, chronicling his route so that if you know the centre of St Petersburg well, you can follow it exactly.  For my selection, I started with a picture of his musical and social life in early 1917, leading up to the first of the disturbances. When it came to the full account of the evening upheavals on 27 February, I had to edit down substantially. I thought I'd insert a couple of the passages you won't hear read tomorrow, because they're equally good and vivid. 

Again I found myself on the Field of Mars – only now it was much darker. On the far side of the square, by the Troitsky Bridge, a crowd was shouting ‘Hurrah!’. Firing was audible. I quickly made my way, almost running, across the square. I wasn’t wearing galoshes, and my feet slipped on the icy pavement. At one point I slipped so badly I could hardly keep upright and grabbed at the arm of a passing colonel He quickly turned around to see me. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I seem to have alarmed you’.  The colonel replied, ‘On the contrary, I was alarmed that you might fall’. And he continued: “Why are you running? The bullets will catch you anyway. Look, I’m not hurrying’.

I could have answered him that if one crosses a square in one minute rather than three, then one has three times less chance of being hit by a bullet. But I was not in the mood for debate, and said: ‘Yes, but I’m in a hurry’, bowing and moving on...Having come near to the ‘Mir isskustva’ Exhibition Hall, I thought that it might be easier to go and spend the night at Dobychina’s, since there so much firing on the palace side that it seemed pointless to carry on that way. At first I resolved to slip along the Yekaterinsky Canal; it seemed quiet there and there was no reason to expect a disturbance on that street.  

As soon as I reached the canal, than there appeared on the other side a crowd of soldiers surrounded by workers. They were shouting and singing, and heading towards the Field of Mars. Clearly this was a part of the army that had gone over to the revolutionaries’ side. Making use of the fact that the canal was between us, I quickly made for the Church of the Saviour of the Blood, reasoning that in the case of gunfire breaking out, I would be able to shelter behind its walls. I asked people I met if it was possible to cross Nevsky, and replies varied: some said it was possible if one ran quickly, others said it was frightful. One woman said: ‘Don’t go there. There are folk on the rooftops firing their revolvers at anything they encounter.'  

I didn't give this much credence and pressed on. People appeared out of the darkness like greyish ghosts. I decided that I too must appear like a ghost, and they couldn't possibly fire at every phantom.

Regrettably I also had to skip some vivid details Prokofiev gives of the morning after, only mentioning in passing how he helped to save a plain-clothes policeman from lynching. 

There are plenty of photos and paintings of officers and policemen being arrested - the one above brings it all specifically to life, though the below painting of generals being carted off is vivid reportage too.

So here's the text in question.

On the Fontanka huge fires were burning fiercely. They were destroying the home of a divisional police chief. Out of a third floor window flew green sofas, tablecloths and whole cupboards full of papers. The cupboards created a specially strong impression as they slowly hovered over the window sills before toppling over, wheezing somewhat, and falling to the pavement, straight into the bonfire. The cupboard would break up, the glass doors shattered into pieces and whole swarms of papers rose upwards in the fire and the wind above the entire building. The crowd made a spiteful racket. Cries were heard: ‘bloodsucker! It’s our blood you’ve been sucking!’ I did not sympathise with the mob. The violence depressed me. I wondered whether the policeman’s family had escaped the pogrom. 

In the afternoon mama and I went to look at revolutionary Petrograd, which had taken on a very festive air. At Gostinny Dvor there was another incident involving a policeman: I saw how two students were dragging off a fat old grey-haired man in civilian clothes, accompanied by an infuriated crowd who were crying out ‘A plain-clothes copper!’ People came running from all directions to look, and I thought it would not go well for him. Then someone shouted ‘ no lynch law!’ and now I too started to yell ‘no lynch law!’ Some folk joined me, but others cried out ‘Kill him!’ and pushed their fists into his face. He tried to speak, but it seemed saw nothing in front of him. One of the number of us who had been against lynching cried: “surround him with soldiers!’

But the soldiers couldn’t force their way through the enraged mob. The policeman was on quite a high-level section of pavement, a few steps away from me. With all my strength I pushed backwards and repulsed a few folk from the pavement. The soldiers managed to rush into the clear space and reached the policeman. Thus he was separated from the crowd and was more or less safe. I found Mama and we went on our way. 

In my last sequence, I tried at first to take the pith from the rest of Prokofiev's diary entries for the year, but could only in the end summarise his time in the country outside Petrograd working on the 'Classical' Symphony and the First Violin Concerto without a piano, and his river trip down the Volga and Kama. I did manage to slip in his crucial decision to turn back to sunny Kislovodsk in the Caucasus, where he'd been staying with his mother, when his train met another in slushy Minelniye Vodiye carrying grim reports of the cities to which he was heading. And the final entry for the year is pithy, too.

For documentary realism on the October Revolution, silvered with artistic mastery, you have to watch as much of Eisenstein's October as has been assembled in recent years. I didn't realise what a total masterpiece it is until I saw it at the Barbican the other week with a special live 'performing version' of Edmund Meisel's original score, though there's actually no such thing since what he composed wasn't used in Leningrad or Berlin. 

What Bernd Thewes has done from close examination of the manuscripts for 90-piece orchestra - on this occasion, the LSO - is nevertheless a marvel, and though no composer could ever reflect Eisenstein's montage whizzing, in this case around the gorgeous objects in the Hermitage, where he had free rein in 1928, the blocks of mechanistic sound fitted the film supremely well. Three cheers to Kino Klassika for presentation of this giddying spectacle. Much more about it here on The Arts Desk.

UPDATE (10/11) My producer, Michael Rossi, has sent me a link to the six clips, which you can listen to here. They should be among the highlights by Monday. I heard some splendid things on the day itself. Tom Service's afternoon guests included Marina Frolova-Walker - she's always perfect on interesting chapter and verse - and he played some extraordinary music, including a sequence of shorter avant-garde pieces and the UK broadcast premiere of Mosolov's riotous Symphonic Poem. Katie Derham had a balalaika player and a theremin among the visitors to In Tune, and the Royal Liverpool Phil performance of Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony in the evening was excellent.

Antic Saturday

That was a crazy one, Saturday 9 February, very much crowned by Mark Rylance's matinée anti-idol of a Richard III (production photos by Simon Annand). The day's trajectory became seriously complicated when Gillian Moore, Head of Classical Music at the Southbank Centre, rang up late the previous afternoon to ask if I could step in for Tom Service, who'd gone down with the norovirus, to give a talk in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer. When? In 19 hours' time, at 12.30pm, for an hour. On what? Paris 1910-1930, the latest subject in The Rest is Noise festival of 20th century music.

Well, that I could do, basing it around what I knew of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes - quite a bit - and Prokofiev's viewpoint on the city as a resident in the 1920s. Gillian wanted me to include a fair amount of music from the concerts that were about to be performed. I replied that at such short notice I'd have to make do with what I'd got on the shelves. Fortunately I did have a copy of Antheil's Ballet Mécanique, and a CD of Josephine Baker, so that covered two essential requirements.

The preparation time, though, was short. I couldn't sacrifice a Friday night reunion with old Edinburgh University pals, two of whom had already arrived to stay from Washington and Cardiff. It turned out to be a wonderful evening, 15 round a big table at the Joy King Lau in Soho, including superstar Kerry Richardson of Bedlam Theatre Cabaret fame (now 'in telly') whom I hadn't seen for over 30 years. And a milestone in one way at least: the first time the six of us who spent a golden year together in 32 Dundas Street had sat down to eat together since 1982.

I got back predictably lateish, didn't sleep much and was up at 7am to start preparation. Half way through, the CD I'd started to burn with the extracts failed. And a second, a third, a fourth. A faulty pack. At 10am I pedalled furiously to Hammersmith, bought a decent set of CD-Rs and rushed back. Got to the Queen Elizabeth Hall at 12.10pm with 20 minutes to spare for a quick soundcheck. The Southbank team couldn't have been more soothing or friendly - and that includes the sound man, who must be the first of his ilk to say how much he'd enjoyed it at the end.

I had fun (and kinda glad Ben Larpent, Southbank Classical Music Programme Manager, documented the occasion, however weird I look with right arm flapping. Maybe I should have gone for Josephine's Banana Dance look). What a great audience - some seated in front of the stage, others eating at tables, including a jolly mother and baby.

Jude Kelly did the same relaxed, thoroughly professional job of introducing and questioning at the end I'd noted at James MacMillan's talk the previous week. I'd been asked to give some substantial excerpts, though obviously my playlist was quite different from the one Gillian had set up in The Guardian. I thought I'd keep a record of it here. To keep it short I won't list the recordings used.

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (1913) - introduction compared with Musorgsky's shepherd-boy pipings at the end of the Sorochintsy Fair interlude we know as the epilogue to Night on the Bare Mountain; the 5/4-6/4 tune for the Spring Rounds compared with the 11/4 finale of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden; Procession of the Sage (polyrhythms) and Kissing the Earth (The Sage). (Image above: one of Roerich's designs for the original production).

Ravel: Ma mère l'oye - Beauty and the Beast, in the orchestral arrangement of 1910/12

Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole - Habanera, starting with four-hand piano version of 1895 and morphing into the orchestral arrangement of 1908

Stravinsky: Etude pour pianola (1917)

Antheil: Ballet Mécanique (1922-30 - opening (four-pianola version; see end of blog entry for later performance with film)

Satie: Parade (1917) - sequence with typewriter, pistol-shots and siren (photo: Picasso's designs for the American and French managers)

Milhaud: La création du monde (1923) - jazz fugue

Josephine Baker - 'J'ai deux amours' (1930)

Prokofiev: The Prodigal Son (1928-9) - final theme

A question or two, and then I had 20 minutes to whizz over the Thames to the matinée of Richard III. I've already begun to treat of this (in superlatives) in an earlier blog entry under that very funny photo of Rylance's king bearing a 'No Parking' traffic sign. I wish I'd caught the latest of his celebrated post-run speeches, but even at the penultimate show he managed to praise the first of the double-cast princes who were taking their leave and to say, with his usual tear-jerking sincerity, what a joy it had been for all of the actors to see so many kids in the audience.

There must have been more, of course, in the initial Globe run. I'd heard that MR took time to warm to his chameleonic impersonation after a family bereavement, but by the end of this Apollo Theatre transfer he was absolutely in his element from the very first speech. The voice has a greater range now - he can be bass-baritonal as well as his usual tenorial self. He had the extraordinary way of fixing on the stalls and on us in the upper circle so that you got the feeling he was looking directly at you. The laughing, and laughter-making, player of the first half became the deadly psychopath of the second, though, so that the roaring audience fell very silent.

The other joy of Tim Carroll's production, every inch as good as his Twelfth Night which I didn't dare see this time after fond memories of four Globe performances, was the teamwork. Maybe Johnny Flynn as Lady Anne was vocally a little weak, but the other 'ladies' couldn't have been better. James Garnon, whose star quality first shone at the Globe in Carroll's otherwise disappointing Dido, Queen of Carthage and flamed as James I in Brenton's Anne Boleyn, metamorphosed from a dignified Duchess of York into a plausible, noble successor to the throne at the end. Finest of all was Sam Barnett's Queen Elizabeth.

With Barnett and Rylance, the spat between bereaved mother and child-murderer was hair-raising: I'd never thought of it as one of the great scenes in Shakespeare, but I do now. The battle stuff that followed can drag; never for a moment here, with the rivals in their tents deftly intercut and the ghosts of the slain gathering round Richmond to despatch York.

 I came out wishing that after all I could stay on and see the same company + S Fry (not a draw for me personally after earlier, marvellous Malvolios) in the Twelfth Night production I knew and loved so well. But Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky beckoned over at the Barbican, with live accompaniment from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under a meticulously synchronising Martyn Brabbins pretext for The Arts Desk review. I've seen this version three times live now, and the film many more, and I seem to have got past the stage of scoffing at the propagandist black-and-white of Nevsky as compared to the more nuanced Ivan the Terrible.

On this occasion I simply admired the actors' superb handling of their types. Nikolay Cherkassov's prince is so handsome and stirring, of course, but it was marvellous to hear the audience laughing so readily at Nikolay Okhlopkov's buffoon. A rich ending to a teeming Saturday; and on Sunday I was rescued from having to review Novello's Gay's the Word when I arrived at Barons' Court to find the District Line inoperative and the Piccadilly Line recently  closed by a 'person under a train' - and that in itself was understandable on a cold, deluging February afternoon.

Grand finale - only connect: Eisenstein thought Fernand Léger's 1924 film to accompany Antheil's Ballet Mécanique was 'one of the true masterpieces of cinema'. I'm not sure how well it synchs with the music, which only joined it in the 1990s (and in the later version where the pianos are all but drowned out by the percussion and 'special effects'). But it's quite something to have both together.

Electric Nevsky

Polymath BBC TV producer/director David Thompson couldn't have chosen a better place to film our talking-heads interval five minutes on the forthcoming Prom featuring Prokofiev's cantata-version Alexander Nevsky (short of going to Russia, that is, and the budgets are, shall we say, a little limited these days). I haven't been to the Electric Cinema in the Portobello Road for some years - now they only show mainstream hits for the most part, as befits the area's very mixed population - and I'd forgotten how spectacularly beautiful it is inside. In the meantime, here's one more from without.


Opened early in 1910 as an offshoot of the original in Birmingham, the Notting Hill Electric's interior still retains the elegance of Gerald Seymour Valentin's Edwardian baroque. In 2001 it re-opened after an impressive £2 million restoration, which means wide leather seats and tons of leg room/drinks space. David, incidentally, used to work there, which puts him in the very dubious company of the Rillington Place murderer Christie (a projectionist, apparently).


We filmed at the back; my good colleague Marina Frolova-Walker turned up just as I'd finished and she was to be captured in front of the screen - which now has a mechanical device for popping out of its frame for widescreen films. I hope I answered most of David's questions (to which he already knows most of the answers himself in detail, certainly more so than me when it comes to the Eisenstein aspect), but I was conscious of keeping them more soundbitey than usual given the limited time and how much is inevitably going to end up on the cutting-room floor. At the end I turned my far less impressive minicamera on the team: David left, sound man Paul Vigars barely visible and cameraman Mike O'Halloran, who said he'd sorted the problem of my old glasses with their worn non-reflecting patina (still haven't replaced the more recent ones which got mangled up in the bikesmash).


I think I have Prokofiev's part in film and cantata pretty much off pat now, but it was a good opportunity to try and understand better Eisenstein's very detailed analysis of what he calls the 'congruence of the movement of the music with the movement of the visual sense' in his first major book The Film Sense, of which I am very proud to own an austere war-economy first edition copy. The diagrams in the text - he devotes thirteen pages to twelve shots - are a bit scary, but it does make good sense when you fold out the diagram in the back of the book.


The main point here is that the music's rising, plunging and horizontals are reflected very precisely in the composition of the images. It might become clearer if I reproduce a close-up of the first three shots with diagram and music.


Anyway, I waved The Film Sense around in trying to talk about it for the little documentary, so I hope it adds up sufficiently to be used in the film. Inevitably I wanted to say a little bit more about Ivan the Terrible, which is surely a much deeper, more wide-ranging collaboration between Prokofiev, Eisenstein and the cinematographer Edward Tisse, but Nevsky's Battle on the Ice sequence is where it all began in the sense of the film being composed to the music, and not vice-versa. It's to be found here, with the passage in question starting 10m27s into the sequence (if you want the full Battle on the Ice you'll have to go on to the next segment once this one reaches its end). The soundtrack is famously poor, though listen out for the trombones blaring directly into the microphone, a celebrated sound-innovation.



The cantata version is, of course, very different, and sounds so symphonic when in fact it's just Prokofiev's usual suite-like stitching together: except that the climax is a radical departure from the percussion-only thrash of the icebreak in the film. Svetlanov's performance is peerless, and I'm so glad it's there on YouTube, though I expect Andris Nelsons to make a thrilling job of the cantata on 30 July (just one thing - what were they thinking in scheduling Strauss's Salome's Dance at the end? An official encore? Anyway, Nelsons does that brilliantly too).



Better not spill any more beans, otherwise you won't tune in to BBC Two. One thing I can't recommend too highly is the stunningly comprehensive Criterion three-disc set of Eisenstein's sound years.


It features not just Nevsky and Ivan but also deleted scenes, a reconstruction of the film-maker's unfinished and much criticised Bezhin Meadow and a documentary which gives more detail on the Hollywood/Disney/Stokowski connection than any I've seen.