Prokofiev:Alexander Nevsky

Ni Abbado ni la LSO están en su mejor momento.

The originals of these performances date from 1978 and 1980, the remastering having been done in 1995. It will come as no great surprise to anyone that DG have done the job very well, something that is apparent from the very first note of Nevsky. This is a great sonorous chord, magnificently scored and magnificently reproduced for us here. As far as the recording goes all the way through, I found myself ticking off the pluses. The enunciation of the LSO chorus is admirably clear: not a hint of distortion in the cacophonies featured in The Battle on the Ice or (slightly less so) at various points in the Scythian Suite: the distant trumpet in Kije may or not be too distant for your taste but it is very clear; and the cornet that gets the famous tune for Kije's wedding (first cousin to Peter's tune in Peter and the Wolf) has the right brashness to it. Is the solo voice in The Field of the Dead slightly backward? Debatable again. This may well have been intended as realistic concert-hall balance rather than the forward in-your-ear engineering that was so popular as lately as the 70's.How one is going to rate the performances will also depend on a few basic assumptions - as usual, I guess. For instance, do you stress over the issue of authentic Russian style? I can't say that I do, one of my main reasons being that authentic national styles do not stay authentic indefinitely, but develop and change over the decades. If nobody had told me who the artists were here I would certainly have known that I was not listening to Mravinsky and the Leningrad Phil. On the other hand, Gergiev and the Kirov these days do not sound much like Mravinsky either, indeed it is quite arguable that they sound more like Abbado and his western bands. If the music is good enough and the interpreters are good enough it will be a matter of the various cultures shedding different lights on the music, much as sculpture or architecture can be viewed in different lights. I actually believe that there is a danger in Abbado's training, and the danger is that it can all turn out too smoothed-over and homogenised. The risk is not that some new and foreign style is foisted on the music but that there can come to be a generalised one-style-fits-all. Anyway, this slight worry stayed at the back of my mind in listening to this disc, and I am not seriously in doubt of the 5-star rating.The performances are thoroughly recommendable, particularly to newcomers to this music. The real masterpiece is the great cantata Alexander Nevsky, and as I have said already you will be given the right impression from note one. The only real question mark in my mind here is the mezzo-soprano soloist. She sings her sad song most affectingly and expressively, but this is not my idea of a great voice, and this is my idea of a little too much vibrato. I don't really have a clear opinion regarding how `highlighted' this solo should be, but what was obtruding itself on my thoughts was the solo in Brahms's Requiem as sung on the Tennstedt set by Jessye Norman. I like to think that this is not trying to rival that, because it would be no contest if it were.The Scythian Suite goes just fine for me. This started life as a ballet score, reminiscent quite often of the Rite of Spring, which it may have been trying to emulate. In particular I like the tempo chosen for the Dance of the Spirits of Darkness. This is marked `allegro sostenuto', which says to me that it should not be too fast, and the galumphing effect is the way I like the piece to be handled.Kije would be better spelt, Russian-style, as Kizhe, because that would make it clear how the nonexistent lieutenant came into existence through a simple error in word-division. The unusual `name' caught the eye of the Tsar, and from that point on people were panicking around to try to provide him with a life-story in case the Tsar asked any more questions. It all began as a film score apparently, and I should say that is all any of us need to know about the programme in order to enjoy the crisp and smart music.Not many things are perfect, and no mild reservations that I may have about this set give me any misgiving in awarding all 5 stars. There is a liner-note, and it is rather a pity that it wastes so much of its brief column-allocation in trying to tell us what to admire. What I find admirable I have just tried to explain, and I can summarise it by saying that this is a well-engineered and highly professional reissue of well-directed and highly professional performances.

bought it for Lieutinant Kijé which I love

There's a lot of really great recorded music on this album with very good dynamic range. The highlight of course, is the suite Prokofiev extracted from the Eisenstein WWII Soviet Propaganda film, "Alexander Nevsky", complete with a wonderful chorus and dark mezzo adding real drama to this performance led by Maestro Abbado.However, after some critical listening, and a bit of software evaluation with a phase 'scope, I discovered there is a serious technical flaw in the CD transfer of "Nevsky" that I'm just plain astonished escaped the talented "tonmeisters" at Deutsche Gramophone!It turns out that my ears were indeed on to something: there is a very serious sonic problem with this release! Apparently, nobody doing the CD remastering bothered to check their phase 'scopes for the final CD master: One of the audio channels of the "Nevsky" recording is completely out of phase with the other channel! This anomaly leads to reduced bass, "wandering" image, and a vague spaciousness that doesn't sound natural. This is especially noticeable during the soloist singing in Track 6, "Field of the Dead", on this album. The singer's voice, rather than staying stable in the center of the musical stage, suddenly moves dramatically about as if she was walking back and forth across the stage during the performance!This phasing difficulty can be easily rectified by some playback systems, albeit more rudimentary systems require swapping the speaker wires to one channel, if there's no "Channel Phase Reversal" switch on the playback equipment. The resultant sound, once this out of phase "glitch" is corrected, becomes much more cohesive, with impactful bass, a far more full orchestral ambience, and stable imaging.The Chicago Symphony recordings do not seem to suffer the same fate!It is regrettable that this CD is indeed flawed by this oversight, which should not have made it to commercial CD release with this problem.

I bought this on a whim, as I am looking to expand my knowledge of Prokofiev`s music; I know the film the Nevsky cantata was written for and the Lieutenant Kijé suite is of course very familiar – only the Scythian Suite was unknown to me.I can`t comment on the interpretations by Abbado, the LSO and chorus, mezzo-soprano soloist Elena Obraztsova and the CSO who perform the two suites with any authority other than to say that I think the music is enjoyable and very well recorded; I don`t have any issues with the digital remastering which to my ears is balanced, spacious and very acceptable.All the texts for Alexander Nevsky are included in Russian with English/German/French translations.The CD has a playing time of 78.51 minutes; click on the blue highlighted link in the AutoRip instructions above to hear the sound samples – if the option is still available.