FABULOUS MUSICIANS: S. PROKOFIEV AND N. MEDTNER

This year marks the 130th anniversary of the birth of S. S. Prokofiev and the 70th anniversary of the death of N. K. Medtner. The article provides a socio-cultural background to the similar circumstances of the lives of these two great musicians. Both were forced to leave Russia during the October events, learning all the difficulties of emigration. Their joint tour in the USSR in 1927 was for Medtner a last meeting with his beloved Moscow, where he had studied and taught at the Conservatory, while Prokofiev's emigration ended with his return home. The author wonders what brought together such different personalities as Sergey Prokofiev and Nikolay Medtner. The composers were united, among other things, by a special interest in narrative genres derived from folk epic poetry. However, each musician interpreted them differently — while the composer of "Tales of an Old Grandmother" was more interested in the representational aspect, Medtner wrote works with a more psychological depth.

SERGEY PROKOFIEV AND SERGEY SLONIMSKY: A DOUBLE PORTRAIT IN THE INTERIOR OF THEATER, CINEMA AND RADIO

This article demonstrates the general principles in the work of S. S. Prokofiev and S. M. Slonimsky, artists who are brightly individual and bold in their creative search. This thesis is confirmed by the two composers' memoirs: Prokofiev's Autobiography and Slonimsky's "Burlesques, Elegies, Dithyrambs in Despicable Prose". The author touches upon the theme "the Composer and the Drama Theater", which reveals the approach of the director (G. A. Tovstonogov) and the composer (S. M. Slonimsky) to the musical design of the performance based on the novel "Quiet Flows the Don" by M. A. Sholokhov. The paper provides excerpts from the book of the famous actor, screenwriter and director A. V. Batalov, as well as his views on radio dramaturgy as the director of a radio play about the childhood of Sergey Prokofiev. It is emphasized that A. V. Batalov made an accent on the leading role of the composer's works in compositional dramaturgy of the radio performance.

Dostoevskian Literary Poliphony as Lyrical-Theatrical Hypostasis of Sergey Prokofiev’s Opera The Gambler

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s perspective on humankind and society continues to intrigue any reader, whether specialized or from other areas of activity, due to the universality of the topics and the complexity of the characters involved. The novel entitled The Player depicts the life and specific concerns of 19th-century world society, a subject which attracted Sergey Prokofiev to compose a work with the same title, at the beginning of the 20th century. His opera is a unique work through the avant-garde musical language, the atypical construction of the discourse, the elements of style and conception of the libretto in relation to the original source. These elements generate a multiple correlation between the Dostoevskian prose, literary theory, the philosophy of language through studies and volumes of hermeneutic analysis, such as those signed by critic and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin, on which we will focus our attention during this research. The terminology used by Bakhtin (dialogism, polyphony, ventrilogism, carnival) indicates a profound insight into the connection between Dostoevsky’s prose and the theatrical, dramatic, lyrical, musical aspects of the epic substratum in his novels. At the same time, Dostoevsky was an involuntary forerunner of the artistic movement initiated in Western Europe by German composers – Expressionism –, which also had echoes in the works of Russian composers from the first half of the last century, as we shall see in Sergey Prokofiev’s approach of The Gambler.

SERGEY PROKOFIEV’s PETER AND THE WOLF THROUGH AN INTERMEDIAL LENS

Peter and the wolf is an intermedial work based on a folk tale originally written and composed by the Russian composer Sergey Prokofiev in 1936 (Hanson and Hanson 1964). Since few recent adaptations of the work in Afrikaans exist, a combined intermedial project was undertaken to recreate the work using practice-based research. The stages of this research method have brought forth a poetic text, the realisation of the original music, illustrations, and a voice artist to read the created text. To accomplish the final artistic product, it was important to obtain a theoretical foundation of practice-based research, intermediality, adaptation and the different media involved in the created word. The intermedial effects between the different media in the project provided the results of the study, stemming not only from the readers’ simultaneous experiences of the media as they read or listen to the work but, as it also became clear, from the mutually complementary effects between the different media of which their combination provided a richer final product.