At first glance, the choice of composers for this recording seems like an odd match: one cultivated a harsh, expressive musical language, while the other was a proponent of introspective soundscapes. One piece ends in an explosion, while the other offers us meditative contemplation. We also have an apparent clash of nationalities: Prokofiev was Russian, (b. Sontsivka, Ukraine) Silvestrov is Ukrainian, and conductor Dmitry Matvienko is Belarusian. But through art and music, we can always meet in dialogue and mutual understanding. What may first seem like madness has a clear logic. In Dmitry Matvienko's view, there are strong links between the two composers. Quoting Valentin Silvestrov's belief that "only melody makes music eternal," Matvienko explains why he chose Quiet Music for this recording. Despite very different musical languages, both composers were exceptional melodists who regarded melody as the foundation of all music, regardless of genre or 20thcentury avant-garde trends. Matvienko also sees both works as shaped by their historical realities. Prokofiev's symphony reflects the devastation of the post-war era and foreshadows future catastrophe, while Silvestrov's Quiet Music, written in 2002, predates but resonates deeply with later conflicts. Prokofiev could not have imagined the tragedy that would unfold decades after his death, yet history reveals the cyclical nature of evil. His work on Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible exposed a ruler's destructive paranoia - an allusion Stalin recognized. Today, Matvienko argues, history repeats itself in new forms. Against this, Silvestrov's Quiet Music offers consolation: a place of refuge open to anyone, beyond nationality or religion, where sorrow can briefly be set aside. It was very important to Dmitry Matvienko to include this piece in this recording: "Silvestrov said in one of his interviews" - "I am so tired of the noise of this world ",- "I understand that and feel it very deeply. More and more often I walk at night and listen to his music; not in headphones, but inside. And it gives me peace. I want this piece to be therapy and solace for our listeners as well."

Sergei Prokofiev's nine piano sonatas, composed between 1909 and 1951, are a monumental body of work that showcases the composer's stylistic evolution through a turbulent period of history. Renowned for their virtuosic technical demands and psychological depth, the sonatas are considered a cornerstone of the 20th-century piano repertoire. The famous "War Sonatas" (Nos. 6, 7, and 8) are among his most significant and powerful works. Acclaimed pianist Carlo Grante is celebrated for his vast repertoire, commanding technique, and scholarly interpretations. A prolific recording artist, he is particularly renowned for making the first-ever complete recording of Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas performed by a single pianist. In addition to Scarlatti, his recordings cover a vast spectrum of composers, from established masters like Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms to lesser known composers and contemporary figures like Busoni and Godowsky. Many contemporary composers have dedicated works to Grante, including Bruce Adolphe (Chopin Dreams), Roman Vlad (Opus Triplex), and Michael Finnissy. Praised for his technical mastery and profound musicianship, Fabio Luisi, the former Principal Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, described Carlo Grante as "one of the most astonishing artists I have ever known and worked with." Vienna's Die Presse dubbed him "a knight of the piano, without blemish and without fear."

The Royal Ballet's perfect pairing of Marianela Nunez and Vadim Muntagirov takes centre stage in this collection of four fairytale favourites. Royal Ballet founding choreographer Frederick Ashton's Cinderella was brought back to Covent Garden in 2023 to celebrate it's 75th Anniversary with a creative team steeped in the magic of theatre, film and dance bringing new atmosphere to Cinderella's ethereal world of fairy godmothers and pumpkin carriages, handsome princes and finding true love. Ninette de Valois' charming and funny Coppelia is a classic of The Royal Ballet repertory - a story of love, mischief and mechanical dolls. The intricate choreography is set to Delibes' delightful score and shows off the technical precision and comedic timing of the whole company. Osbert Lancaster's designs bring a colourful storybook world to life in this entertaining and joyful ballet. Marius Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty holds a special place in The Royal Ballet's repertory, with it's vibrant sets and glittering costumes and featuring such iconic moments as the Rose Adage, the Vision Pas de Deux, the exuberant wedding celebration and the charming fairy-tale guests, all danced to Tchaikovsky's richly layered music - one of the most beloved ballet scores of all time. Swan Lake is perhaps the best-loved of all the classical ballets. This production by Liam Scarlett features additional choreography while remaining faithful to Petipa and Ivanov's classic. John Macfarlane's opulent designs provide an atmospheric, period setting for this enthralling love story, illuminated by Tchaikovsky's sublime score.

The young talent Michal Balas has recorded Prokofiev's Sinfonia Concertante together with the Pilsen Philharmonic Orchestra. This album will follow his well received debut release on Berlin Classic, which featured hte Haydn Cello Concertos. Balas was recognized as "Classic FM 30 under 30 rising stars" and won the first prizes at "Classic String Competition" in Dubai as well as many other competitions.

The Royal Ballet's perfect pairing of Marianela Nunez and Vadim Muntagirov takes centre stage in this collection of four fairytale favourites. Royal Ballet founding choreographer Frederick Ashton's Cinderella was brought back to Covent Garden in 2023 to celebrate it's 75th Anniversary with a creative team steeped in the magic of theatre, film and dance bringing new atmosphere to Cinderella's ethereal world of fairy godmothers and pumpkin carriages, handsome princes and finding true love. Ninette de Valois' charming and funny Coppelia is a classic of The Royal Ballet repertory - a story of love, mischief and mechanical dolls. The intricate choreography is set to Delibes' delightful score and shows off the technical precision and comedic timing of the whole company. Osbert Lancaster's designs bring a colourful storybook world to life in this entertaining and joyful ballet. Marius Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty holds a special place in The Royal Ballet's repertory, with it's vibrant sets and glittering costumes and featuring such iconic moments as the Rose Adage, the Vision Pas de Deux, the exuberant wedding celebration and the charming fairy-tale guests, all danced to Tchaikovsky's richly layered music - one of the most beloved ballet scores of all time. Swan Lake is perhaps the best-loved of all the classical ballets. This production by Liam Scarlett features additional choreography while remaining faithful to Petipa and Ivanov's classic. John Macfarlane's opulent designs provide an atmospheric, period setting for this enthralling love story, illuminated by Tchaikovsky's sublime score.

Prokofiev first attempted to write an opera at the age of nine. His mature operas include The Love for Three Oranges, written in 1919, The Fiery Angel and War and Peace, the last based on Tolstoy's novel. His later ballets include Romeo and Juliet, and Cinderella. Both ballets as well as the first mentioned opera are known to concert audiences from orchestral suites based on them. Prokofiev wrote seven symphonies. Of these, the Classical Symphony, a work written in 1916-17 with the work of Haydn in mind, is the best known. Of Prokofiev's five piano concertos the third is best known, written in the composer's instantly recognizable musical language, from the incisive opening to the motor rhythms that follow, in a mixture of lyricism and acerbic wit. More overtly romantic in feeling are the two fine violin concertos. His early Cello Concerto was followed in 1952, fourteen years later, by a Cello Concertino, completed by the cellist Rostropovich and the composer Kabalevsky after Prokofiev's death. Prokofiev, himself a formidable pianist, completed nine piano sonatas out of a projected eleven. His music for piano also includes piano versions of music from the ballets Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella.

Simply the best.

This release turned up just as James Ehnes’s superb two disc ‘Complete Works for Violin’ has been receiving massive plaudits. With this being the 60th anniversary of 1953 these coincidences are always likely, but unless SACD sound is a deciding factor when purchasing such releases this does put Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe straight against stiff competition.

By any standards these are all terrific performances, recorded in stunning sound - up quite close and personal, but with plenty of space around the instruments, inviting us in rather than blowing us off our seats. The BIS balance puts the piano on a more equal footing than that with Chandos, where the violin is a little closer in feel, though not to the extent that it covers the piano. Ehnes has a fine parlando feel in the first movement of the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1, which heightens the emotion in a part of the piece which can sometimes sound a little static. Vadim Gluzman has this and greater eloquence, giving even passages of restraint an emotional weight which carries us forward into realms of ever increasing intensity. Ehnes is more abstract, which has its own strengths, but which keeps this first movement as more of a prelude rather than a powerful statement in its own right. The drier Chandos acoustic is less favourable to the chunky notes which throw us straight into the deep end of the Allegro brusco, played with greater on-the-edge string-grabbing heft by Gluzman. The theme at 1:07 becomes a dramatic moment here as if the entire piece has been building to this point, and Gluzman and Yoffe hold us in a grip of staggering intensity. For all its fine qualities, Ehnes and Armstrong’s performance is somewhat blown out of the water by Gluzman and Yoffe, whose Andante in this piece is meltingly beautiful, the muted violin having a nicer tone than Ehnes, Yoffe’s arabesques in the piano and the deeper sonority in the bass line phrases also having a greater expressive effect. The final Allegrissimo is hugely exciting in both performances, Ehnes and Armstong being swifter by an appreciable margin, but Gluzman/Yoffe able to muster massive sonorities and greater degrees of contrast for the more lyrical passages as a result.

For us flute players the popularity of the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in D Major Op. 94bis will always be something of a sore point, but it is such good music that, in the end, who cares what it’s played on. Once again it is Gluzman and Ehnes in competition, but the comments with regard to the first sonata are equally valid in this case. Ehnes and Armstrong are excellent, but Gluzman and Yoffe are just so much more beefy, more involving. Again it comes back to emotion against abstraction - Ehnes and Armstrong technically brilliant and musically sensitive, but Gluzman and Yoffe conjuring a considerable extra layer of poetry and empathetic impact. Little extra touches of weight on certain notes or harmonies, a little more detail in the articulation, a few degrees more breath and freedom in the music all adding up and making the big difference in the end. There are of course other competitors in this field, and that with Isabelle van Keulen and Ronald Brautigam on Challenge Classics comes from the same Sendesaal acoustic as this BIS recording. I’ve only been able to listen to this online and it does sound like an excellent release, also a Chandos-beater in these pieces but to my ears still not quite displaying the same degree of convincing musical depth and weight as Gluzman/Yoffe. Keulen and Brautigam tend to slightly swifter tempi which have their own excitement, but it is that sense of every note and phrase conveying its own message, like the sentences in an intimate letter, which makes this BIS recording a touch more special. Take the tender Andante of Op.94 bis, which both duos take at roughly similar, fairly swift and suitably unsentimental tempi. Keulen and Brautigam have fine phrasing and dynamics, but when compared to Gluzman and Yoffe appear almost just to be charging ahead and missing the points the latter find so precious. Without disturbing the flow of the music Gluzman holds onto notes a fraction longer here and there, Yoffe in perfect synchronization, introducing a sense of nostalgic yearning right from the start and delivering that sense of narrative which I always bang on about, but which I all too rarely find in actual fact. That second section is a bit like our characters have decided to go for a walk in the park on Challenge Classics, where at 1:05 our BIS artists manage to establish a magical change of mood, celestial and poetic - creating all kinds of flitting images in the mind rather than conjuring amused feet sweeping through autumn leaves.

The Three Pieces from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ open with ‘that music off of BBC’s The Apprentice’, Montagues and Capulets performed with maximum power and a sense or real orchestral thrust from pianist Angela Yoffe. Prokofiev wrote all too few works for violin and piano, and this arrangement by D. Grjunes is a fine addition to the repertoire, also including the Dance of the Girls with Lilies and Masks.

I’ve admired Vadim Gluzman’s playing before, and all of his recordings on the BIS label can safely be recommended. It’s tricky to be definitive, but of the more recent recordings of these sonatas I have heard this would be the one for me. There are others. Ilya Grubert and Matti Raekallio on Ondine is potent stuff, but Grubert is a bit shouty on some accents and there are too many unappealing moments to make this a real contender. You might come across Joseph Szigeti and Joseph Levine’s historical performance as a digital download from Past Classics, and while this is of great interest I can’t bear Szigeti’s wobbly vibrato, and the balance between violin and piano in the Second Sonata is terminally in favour of the violin, which sounds as if Szigeti is playing while sitting on your lap. So yes, with stunning SACD sound, everything in its favour and with musical qualities which make this a recording to relish for years to come, I’m going to stick my neck out and say Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe are the best for these two Prokofiev masterpieces.

– Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International

Also available on Blu-ray

Romeo and Juliet: Beyond Words is a ballet feature film created by the International Emmy Award-winning Michael Nunn and William Trevitt. It stars the dancers of The Royal Ballet in Kenneth MacMillan’s classic ballet and is set to Sergei Prokofiev’s original score. Highlighting the essence of MacMillan’s world-renowned choreography, Nunn and Trevitt’s Romeo and Juliet takes us into the action with striking intimacy. Through detailed portrayals by The Royal Ballet dancers, we experience Shakespeare’s iconic characters in a new and intimate way, and this groundbreaking film captures the kind of extraordinary performances that have earned The Royal Ballet their world-class reputation. Filmed on location, Nunn and Trevitt’s Romeo and Juliet has been re-imagined for the camera, in a production that is internationally recognized as being at the zenith of dance storytelling. This is a story everyone knows, told in the universal language of dance, presented in a way never seen before.

Gabriel Prokofiev's famous first Concerto for Turntables reached a global audience when performed by Mr. Switch at the 2011 BBC Proms, under the baton of Vladimir Jurowski. It has since been performed 55 times worldwide, with the 5th movement being performed 20 times as part of the BBC's Ten Piece's project. The aim of the piece is to demonstrate the main DJing techniques, with each movement showing off a specific one. Prokofiev's Cello Concerto was composed in 2012 and is the third concerto he composed. It was the most conventional of his concertos, with the other two (at that point) being for Bass Drum and Turntables. Despite this, Prokofiev still manages to explore influences of electronic and dance music in the concerto, whilst also exploring the traditional lyrical side of the cello.

Severin von Eckardstein writes: "Prokofiev's music has always been close to my heart. In his childhood, the Russian composer loved to improvise on the piano, just as I did. His piano style was not as sprawling as, say, that of Rachmaninov, his contemporary. Yet it was all the more flexible, capable of instantly morphing to reflect current events - a style at times fresh and charged with energy, at others suddenly brooding. Prokofiev's music was stylistically multilayered from the onset, here and there juxtaposing melodies of a Classical bent with irony, self-deprecation, and driving rhythmic impulse. His skillful formal mastery and his unquenchable thirst for drama derived from opera, and always served him as a striking, never-ending source of inspiration. In it's impressive cohesion and vitality, Prokofiev's piano output elaborately intermingles a variety of surprising moments where a touch of human feeling sneaks up on the listener, thereby revealing striking sincerity and profound inner feeling. Far from consisting in episodes of post-Romantic bathos, these are moments of bleak, violent despair. Take, for example, the emotional outbreaks and the instances of sudden, hushed introversion in Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto, written prior to the Russian Revolution."

Written in 1944, Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony is one of his greatest and most complete symphonic statements. At its première he himself called it “a symphony of the grandeur of the human spirit”. The first movement couples considerable strength with unexpected yet highly characteristic twists of melody. After a violent scherzo followed by a slow movement of sustained lyricism, with a fiercely dramatic middle section, the finale blazes with barely suppressed passion. The Year 1941 is another wartime work, a symphonic suite written in response to the German invasion of the Soviet Union. This is the first volume a of complete cycle of the Prokofiev Symphonies with the OSESP and Marin Alsop, the orchestra’s newly appointed principal conductor.

REVIEW:

Alsop is evidently a sympathetic interpreter of Prokofiev, because the tempo and pacing always feel spot-on, and the character of the music rings true. Naxos offers exceptional reproduction of the vivid instrumental colors with appropriately resonant acoustics, so this series starts off brilliantly, with worthy performances that sound terrific.

– AllMusicGuide.com

Prokofiev first became fascinated by the violin upon hearing the playing of his private teacher, Reinhold Glière. A dozen years later Prokofiev wrote his Violin Concerto No. 1 – a work of contrasting open-hearted lyricism and whimsical playfulness that features a wild central Scherzo with dazzling technical gymnastics. By contrast, the Violin Concerto No. 2 is emotionally reserved and sardonic with an inspired plaintive and long-arching slow movement. Composed to an official Soviet commission for an ensemble piece to be played by talented child violinists in unison, the witty and upbeat Sonata for Solo Violin can also be played by a single performer.

REVIEW:

Tianwa Yang is currently on a roll with single-composer collections for Naxos (look up her Sarasate and Rihm), and this elegantly captured all-Prokofiev effort is especially strong.

First up is the Violin Concerto no. 1. Yang’s silvery legato sweetness is a perfect match for this intensely lyrical work, and the orchestra is equally alive to the score’s brightness, pace and array of translucently scored colors. The fairy-like recapitulation of the first movement’s opening theme is a delicately luminous knockout from everyone. Equally effective is Yang’s sharp-edged clout when the Scherzo takes an acerbic turn.

The Second Concerto offers an opportunity to appreciate Yang’s darker warmth, and the luxurious, heady vibrato and romance she brings to its central movement’s soaring lines. Then the buoyant playfulness and folk pep of her Solo Sonata is a reminder of the qualities that won her a 2015 ECHO Klassik Award for her solo Ysaÿe album. If you want to cover both Prokofiev concertos in a single album, no need to hesitate here.

-- The Strad