It is no exaggeration to say that Sergei Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite resulted from the failure of an ambitious project. In 1915, after Sergei Diaghilev abandoned his plans to stage the composer’s unfinished ballet Ala and Lolli, Prokofiev reworked large sections of the rejected score, creating a four-movement suite that loosely referred to the ballet’s plot. It evoked images of pagan rituals and the mythological struggle between the life-giving deities of light and the demons of death and darkness, born in the imagination of the poet Sergey Gorodetsky. Prokofiev illustrated all this with extremely evocative music, going beyond the academic routine instilled in him during his years of study at the St Petersburg Conservatoire with his bold ideas. The masterful and unconventional instrumentation is a feature that connects Prokofiev’s work with Claude Debussy’s dance poem Jeux, composed three years earlier, and also commissioned by Diaghilev. Although the choreography for this ballet (created by Vaslav Nijinsky) was coolly received by the audience and did not stand the test of time, Debussy’s music has lost none of its subtle, impressionistic charm to this day.
Written in 1874 as a piano suite, Modest Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, consisting of ten main movements, has been arranged for orchestra many times. However, since it came into the hands of Maurice Ravel in 1922, it is his arrangement that has remained the most frequently performed and recorded. Thanks to his unique sensitivity to orchestral colour and his boundless inventiveness in combining instrumental timbres, Ravel was able to bring out a previously unnoticed artistic depth from each of the miniatures.
Grzegorz Zieziula