1For a composer who has been one of the most widely performed from the twentieth century (if not the most frequently performed), Sergei Prokofiev has received patchy scholarly attention, judging from the available literature (in Russian and English). One might argue that his music is caught between the webs of music academia, in that tricky terrain of overlap between the “repertory” and the “canon”: that is, with several works in heavy rotation of the “repertory” of performing ensembles and soloists, and a handful of pieces in the “canon”, the amorphous grouping of works deemed valuable for core academic study (though ever-changing, and seemingly ever-escaping concrete definition). For Prokofiev’s most frequently performed works, one thinks of the 1^st and 5^th Symphonies, Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, the violin/flute sonata and the “war” piano sonatas, and perhaps the operas Love for Three Oranges and War and Peace – even further still, some of the film music, like Lieutenant Kije, or Aleksandr Nevsky. The “canon” pieces might include some of those already mentioned, but also piano concertos 1-3, and more.

5Rethinking Prokofiev is divided into six parts, with twenty-two chapters in all. In the first section, “Prokofiev and the Russian Models”, Marina Raku starts by giving an overview of Prokofiev’s formative influences in the Russian tradition, before Patrick Zuk gives a detailed account of Soviet composition in the 1920s and 1930s, and Prokofiev’s place within it, and outside it (including his own dismissals of early Soviet music, p. 28). Daniel Tooke then presents an excellent digest of Prokofiev and the Soviet Symphony, including a speedy summary of that most slippery of concepts, “socialist realism”: “‘musical socialist realism’ was an invention of Soviet critics and musicologists, rather than a compositional approach with distinctive stylistic traits” (p. 58). This section provides an excellent background for the detailed studies that follow.

6Part II, “Prokofiev and his Contemporaries”, opens with Marina Frolova-Walker examining Prokofiev in his French phase, exploring how the composer was able to assess which of his works would be more successful in particular countries: “the musical world was no longer a battle that he had to win… but more a marketplace, where different kinds of goods could sell better or worse depending on local conditions” (p. 72). Ivana Medić then surveys the “two-way influence” between Prokofiev and Shostakovich, starting with the trend of scholars comparing Prokofiev with Shostakovich. Medić paints a detailed picture of how Prokofiev and Shostakovich appreciated each other’s works, though it was Prokofiev who often published the harsher criticism. Medić concludes that “their contrasting personalities sometimes clashed, but that did not prevent them from closely following and influencing one another” (p. 105). Nelly Kravetz provides a fascinating chapter on Prokofiev’s friendship with Levon Atovmian; all of their letters are published in Russian but have not been sufficiently explored in Anglophone literature. Here, Kravetz gives a detailed summary of this vital resource, including lengthy extracts, but also gives the backstory to Atovmian’s oratorio based on Ivan the Terrible.

8Part IV focuses on “Drama and Gesture”, beginning with Jane Pritchard on Prokofiev’s early ballets (that is, his earlier 1-act ballets for the Ballets Russes, rather than more famous repertoire like Romeo and Juliet, or Cinderella). In this condensed survey of Prokofiev’s early balletic works, Pritchard manages to quickly survey a range of examples, suggesting promise for further exploration of this neglected repertoire. Christina Guillaumier presents a chapter on Gesture in Prokofiev’s operas, which presents a fast-paced summary that also manages to cover a lot of examples. In some ways a summary of her book-length study, this chapter is particularly useful as an introduction. Katya Ermolaeva’s chapter on “audiovisual montage” in Ivan the Terrible gives a unique perspective: analysing Prokofiev’s film score through Eisenstein’s theories of film sound. She concludes that “that what Prokofiev and Eisenstein achieved in Ivan the Terrible is a synthesized art form” (p. 270). Natalia Savkina then presents an overview of Death in Prokofiev’s dramatic works, suggesting there are two types of “thanatology” present: the positivist (or “absolute”), and the death as transformation (p. 273-274). The result is a far-reaching chapter that touches on a wide variety of examples.

9Part V, “Identity and Structure” presents some of the most significant contributions in the entire book. Guillaumier contributes another chapter, this time presenting a “genealogy” of gestures in the piano works. Particularly useful here is the summary of Prokofiev’s juvenilia which are very rarely discussed. Acclaimed pianist Boris Berman gives a chapter on the five piano concertos (readers might already be familiar with his excellent study on the piano sonatas, published in 2008). Here, Berman lends his recognisable touch to an overview of the five concertos, with reference to recent archival work, such as the early version of the First Concerto (p. 318), or the draft version of the Sixth (p. 331-332). Rita McAllister then presents an extraordinary chapter on Prokofiev’s thematic notebooks. With this subject, McAllister proceeds to give a detailed overview of Prokofiev’s manuscripts and sketches, with an extremely thorough summary of his style and evolution. What is particularly impressive is how much this turns into a kind of stylistic digest of Prokofiev’s entire output, alongside a more modest catalogue of the notebooks themselves. The result is a stand-out contribution, in a book filled with excellent chapters. Konrad Harley closes this section with the most analytical chapter in the book, focusing on Prokofiev’s middle period. He deploys a set-theoretical tool kit to explore important devices including “new simplicity” (p. 369), “decisive moments” (p. 373), and “chromatic displacement” (p. 378). Harley’s neat summary is a valuable contribution to the growing literature of Prokofiev analysis.

10The final part is on the reception and “afterlife” of Prokofiev’s music. Joseph Schultz focuses on Prokofiev’s reception in the United Kingdom, which was evidently a rocky relationship. Still, Prokofiev seems to have always had the last laugh, not least by on one occasion, kissing the wife of a critic who had dismissed his works (p. 386). David G. Tompkins gives a thorough overview of Prokofiev’s influence in Stalinist Central Europe, in particular exploring how “Prokofiev and his music were crucial symbols” that were used to promote socialist realism (p. 420). There is, of course, the tragic aspect that Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin; Tompkins reflects that his death “was clearly put to the service of political ends by cultural officials” (p. 418). Tompkins’s chapter points to further aspects of research, considering that the significance of Prokofiev’s music in the Eastern Bloc is underexplored. Peter Kupfer’s chapter “Prokofiev in the Popular Consciousness” explores the enduring popularity of the composer’s music, in an intriguing study of perception and meaning. Interestingly, Prokofiev’s most frequently played music is often his most socialist-realist (p. 428); Kupfer moves to a survey of listeners, with individual respondents mentioning works (most often, the “Dance of the Knights” from Romeo and Juliet, p. 428). One wonders if a European or Russian audience might recognise very different pieces. To conclude, Richard Taruskin presents a chapter on “Prokofiev’s Problems – and Ours”, presenting Prokofiev as a kind of twentieth-century “Mozart” (p. 450). Taruskin gives an impressive survey of the critical response to Prokofiev’s career, but ends in a kind of personal defence of his own previous criticisms of the composer: “I don’t condemn Prokofiev for doing what he could to better his lot” (p. 471). Rather, Taruskin concludes that the problems of understanding Prokofiev’s political motivations are really problems for twenty-first century artists and audiences.

11Overall, Rethinking Prokofiev is extremely wide in its scope, and it manages to avoid the generalist pitfall of a mere “works survey”. Instead, the reader is left with a thorough illustration of the vibrant world of Prokofiev research at the start of the third decade in the twenty-first century. This reader hopes that long may it continue, not least along the multiple avenues suggested in the chapters of this book. In her survey of Prokofiev’s draft manuscripts, McAllister concludes that the notebooks themselves are “both a delight and a revelation” (p. 362); one could easily say the same about the present volume.