Prokofiev

Thursday

Rupert Christiansen

Rejoice at the Royal Ballet’s superb feast of Balanchine

Any evening devoted to the multifaceted genius of George Balanchine is something to be grateful for, manna in the wilderness indeed, but the Royal Ballet’s current offering left me hungry for more. Three works were on the programme, all created in the early stage of the great man’s career, two of them widely familiar, none of them reflective of anything he created post-war for New York City Ballet. Are his executors reluctant to licence productions of later masterpieces such as Agon or Stravinsky Violin Concerto, or is the Royal Ballet fighting shy of their stylistic challenges? Gripe over, and let’s just rejoice in a feast of superb choreography at Covent

Tuesday

Mathew Lyons

The awful calamity of Stalin being a music lover

At around 9 p.m. on 5 March 1953 Sergei Prokofiev died of a brain haemorrhage on the sofa of his Moscow flat. He was 61, and had struggled for years with ill health. He had long complained of pain in his soul. Less than an hour later, the source of that pain, Joseph Stalin, died of a heart attack in his dacha on the outskirts of Moscow. Prokofiev’s death wasn’t so much forgotten as ignored. The leading music magazine Sovetskaya muzyka devoted the first 115 pages of its new issue to Stalin; only then did it mention Prokofiev. A million people thronged the streets to see Stalin lie in state;