Raising a mug to Prokofiev on his birthday

Serendipity has been at work. Last Wednesday I had the loveliest email imaginable from a lady I'd never met or corresponded with before, Jennifer B Lee, Curator of the Performing Arts Collections in the Rare Book and Manuscripts Library of Columbia University. She'd got my email from a mutual friend, the pianist Barbara Nissman (pictured in the top right hand corner above). Trying to avoid humblebrag, in short Jenny wrote so many kind and positive things about my Prokofiev biog Vol. 1 that it was enough to fire me up to get on with the many-years-delayed Vol. 2 (really, I am). The point, though, is the connection with the Prokofiev Archive, and her delight that I had worked my way through the 40 boxes of papers in the Archive when it was based at Goldsmiths College in London.

The tale of how the Archive went to New York is, in my opinion, a sorry one, and I wanted nothing to do with it for years. That, it seems, is all in the past now, and now the Project Archivist for the Prokofiev Archive, Natalia Ermolaev(a), seems like a splendid person. Jenny told me that Natasha was co-ordinating a Zoom birthday greeting to Prokofiev to make up for the cancellation of a conference at which many of the participants would have been speaking.

They included members of the Prokofiev family - Frances, widow of the composer's much-missed younger son Oleg, now living in Norfolk with her partner Graham (that's them in the lead pic, top left), and three of the grandchildren - Beatrice, Cordelia and Gabriel, who of course has forged a big reputation as composer himself; he was sitting in a garden with wisteria behind and birdsong adding to the soundscape. Assorted babies and small children enhanced the picture. Serge Jr., son of Oleg's brother Sviatoslav (also much missed), sent apologies that he couldn't attend, and I had been so hoping to see one of my favourite Prokofiev people, Natasha Savkina, from Moscow, but she couldn't 'come' either. I won't list the scholars from all over the world - you can see them on the screen - and would just add that I asked a New Best Friend,  pianist Yulia Chaplina, to join from London. Natasha E invited us all to speak in turn, and at the end we raised whatever we had to hand (in my case an empty coffee mug) and I attempted to sing 'mnogaya lyeta' as we always used to intone it in the Kalina Choir (see below), but it needs harmonies underneath... That, as it happens, is Bortnyansky's version

But Prokofiev also provided another one for Eisenstein in the film music for Ivan the Terrible.

The most serendipitous aspect of this all - and here, though rationally I don't believe in such things, there's a small part of me willing to leave the door open to the unexplained - is that without the prompting I would have probably forgotten Prokofiev's official birthday (27 April is the other candidate, owing to clash of statement with birth certificate). And when I remember it, I call to mind more vividly that my beloved Noëlle Mann, the driving force behind the Prokofiev Archive, with whom I collaborated over quite a few precious years, died on the same day. So I was able to go back to my blog posts marking the sad time - which turned into an unexpected kind of visitors' book for tributes to her in the messages - and the wonderful memorial concert, and honour her by talking about her with the group (many of whom never met her). It turns out to have been exactly ten years since she died.

Above is the photo I used at the head of one of those pieces, of Noëlle and her splendid husband Chris (whom I was in touch with briefly last week) at the time of my last visit to her a few weeks before she died, when she was tired but full of plans for the larger future of SSP and encouragement as usual. I think I probably remark on the post about how I admired an old oak at the top of Greenwich Park on my way back, and how I saw another in leaf on the other side at the time of her funeral: not only did the connection with Prince Andrei and the oak in War and Peace seem curious, but Chris told me that the former tree was her favourite, and I couldn't have known that. Here she is celebrating a happier anniversary, 25 years of the Prokofiev Foundation, with Serge Jr. at the Barbican premiere of Prokofiev's original Romeo and Juliet score from the Mark Morris Dance Company.

So many friends and great names have been lost since it all began - as well as Noëlle, Sviatoslav and Oleg, also Christopher Palmer, Alexander Ivashkin (who was heartbroken over the removal of the Archive), Viktor Varunts, Ted and Joan Downes, Rupert Prokofiev and my Russian teacher Joan Pemberton Smith (best known as a translator of Russian opera librettos and songs. She also sang, as I did, in the Kalina Choir conducted by Noëlle, and left an amount to help me get on with Volume Two - I need above all to honour my pledge to her and Noëlle). I'm sure I've omitted a significant name or two, so forgive or prompt me if you're reading this. I also hadn't heard until Frances told me about the death from C-19 of Dmitri Smirnov, married to fellow composer Elena Firsova and father of a wonderful person who's since become a friend, Elena Firsova, another composer and a spellbinding pianist.

This is all three of them at a stupendous Festival Hall concert in which Michail Jurowski, father of Vladimir and another great Prokofiev champion, conducted Schnittke's vast First Symphony. It was my first experience of it live, and predictably it blew me away as Vladimir's performance of the Third had some years earlier; but Dmitri and Elena had been present at the 1974 premiere in Gorky (now Nizhni Novgorod), which caused such a scandal that it was banned in the Soviet Union. Not only were these two fascinating in their insights, but I warmed to them immediately and wish I could have spent more time in Dmitri's company. Hoping to see Alissa and catch her in action when all this is over. 

Proshchai, moya uchitel’nitsa

She always insisted, once we’d got to a certain stage, that only Russian should be spoken in the lessons, so I feel I’m bringing my dear teacher, Joan Smith, back to life and reviving our weekly hours together. Some of you will be familiar with her as Joan Pemberton Smith from the opera and song translation work she did for the record companies. She died several weeks ago after a series of strokes following a complicated illness. I hadn’t seen her and husband Jeremy very often in the past couple of years – the last time was under the sad circumstances of Noelle Mann’s funeral – but her impact has been lasting (especially since I don’t seem to have forgotten too much). I met her through Noelle, and we both sang in the Kalina Choir. So what I’d call my serious Prokofiev work coincided with making the acquaintance of two women who were quite extraordinary in their different ways.

I hadn’t thought we would actually be reading any classic Russian literature in the near future when we began, but within a year we tackled Chekhov’s Rothschild’s Violin. And rather foolhardily, bearing in mind all the Church Slavonic in it, went on to Pushkin’s Boris Godunov as well as various short stories by Paustovsky and Zoshchenko. Joan did rather reproach me that after two or so years battling out to Chislehurst, I didn’t go back for weekly readings of Eugene Onegin, though I did work through it on my own.


Yet though she could be schoolmistressly strict at times, she was fundamentally a genial person and what I remember most is the way her face would light up with special enthusiasms. So I’m glad the top photo was found by Fiona McKnight of the Prokofiev Archive, since one of the two I had didn’t catch the smile, and in the other she’s wearing the ridiculous I-See-You-Jimmy tam-o-shanter with attached red wig hat we foisted on all those who came to sup as a kind of visitors-book record.

At her short memorial service the other Monday, I learnt a few things about Joan I didn’t know as well as reviving the memory of others I did. Born in Leicester in 1929, she won a scholarship to read classics at Cambridge; and as this was only just after the war, she was one of only two women studying her subject (our shared classical training was one of the most helpful aspects to the teaching; Joan could explain the grammatical workings in a way I could understand, as perhaps a native speaker might not have done). Over her years as librarian and teacher, she took a Russian course and soon became an enthusiastic proselytizer. She’d get her little groups to sing Russian folksongs to her guitar accompaniment; she apparently escorted parties to every corner of the then-Soviet Union when it was far from easy to plan travel arrangements. She even played in a balalaika orchestra (this I didn’t know).

Her Czech friend Zdena read a very lovely and fitting Yesenin poem (alas, not in Russian as well as translation, because the minority feared the majority of non-Slavic speakers wouldn’t understand). Failing the possibility of getting a Kalina Choir recording played, I thought the Song of Simeon from the Rachmaninov Vespers would be a fitting piece against which to sit and contemplate. And generally, as the best of these things can be, it was a time to remember fondly, if still tearfully, rather than to wail overmuch.


I ought also to recall one other person of whom I was extremely fond who died this year (may that be the last, please), my good university friend Jerry’s father Michael Pratt, QC. This was, for me, a rather strange concatenation of events: after my Mahler 2 talk at Birmingham, a distinguished white-haired gentleman who looked vaguely familiar came up and asked if I recognized him. Edinburgh? I thought of tutors, drew a blank and then just in time realized who it was (we can’t have met in decades). He’d seen my talk listed in the CBSO programme and came along specially. He took me for a drink with his delightful old friend after the concert, and I was amazed at the sharpness of his memory, the ability to recall details about our happy university days which I’d completely forgotten.

Probably Michael had at that time been a bit of a replacement father figure; it would have been only a couple of years since I’d lost my own. Certainly his generosity knew no bounds, and though we all ribbed him for being, as we saw it, a frightful old reactionary, he was a lot wiser and more complex than that. Read more about him by a colleague who knew him better than I did in the Birmingham Post. Anyway, about a month after that reunion, on 21 June, he died of complications following a heart attack. And I felt a sense of wonder that I’d been able to see him, and that our meeting had felt so meaningful even before what subsequently happened.