PROKOFIEV: Love for Three Oranges.(Review)

PROKOFIEV: Love for Three Oranges [] Netrebko, Shevchenko, Diadkova, Bulycheva, Shevtsova, Korzhenskaya; Akimov, Pluzhnikov, Gerello, Kit, Morozov, Vaneev, Kuznetsov, Karasev, Zhikalov; Kirov Chorus and Orchestra, Gergiev. 1997-98. Transliteration and translation. Philips 298 462 913-2 (2)

Prokofiev always hoped to make his mark first and foremost as an opera composer, and his relative lack of recognition in that medium was a source of disappointment to him. Of his seven completed operas, only Love for Three Oranges can be said to have entered the repertory permanently as of the present day. Perhaps not coincidentally, that is also the one whose subject and treatment most conform to the composer's image as an enfant terrible, a brash young firebrand who mocked his elders and their conventions. To be sure, all of Prokofiev's works for the stage have his nihilistic spirit at their heart in one way or another. In Love for Three Oranges, however, rejection of opera traditions spills over into outright satire of them.

By now, one knows what to expect from Valery Gergiev's sparkling procession of Russian operas on the Philips label with the marvelous Kirov Opera and Orchestra. Typically, the casting is impeccable, and the singing bursts with quirky characterization; the playing under Gergiev is propulsive, fully textured and viscerally thrilling; and the clarity of the recorded soundscape is brilliant. The addition of Love for Three Oranges to this series is a welcome event, and not just because all other recordings of the work have dropped out of the catalogue.

Prokofiev based his libretto on a Russian adaptation of Carlo Gozzi's play of the same name. The combination of Prokofiev and Gozzi, an eighteenth-century advocate of the Italian commedia dell'arte tradition, is indeed a felicitous one, given Gozzi's own propensity for irreverence and lampoonery. Gergiev and his troops in turn embrace this worldview with a muscular Russian bear hug.

The hapless Prince is played to self-mocking perfection by Evgeny Akimov. He manages an endearing sickliness in his first scene, when a procession of entertainments is arranged to try to make him laugh and thereby restore him to health. When he finally does laugh, in response to Fata Morgana's pratfall, his slow-building progression from lightly intoned "haha"s to full-throated guffawing is irresistible. Later, condemned by Morgana's curse to lovesickness for the three oranges, his wails combine full-voiced ardor, appealing ingenuousness and ridiculous pathos in ...