Riccardo Chailly is a big name Italian conductor, and he's done the sort of projects you'd expect from an important conductor: A Brahms symphony cycle, the Mahler symphonies, etc.
But he's also demonstrated an ability for interesting programming on his recordings, and I wanted to call attention to his Prokofiev/Mosolov/Varèse album, pictured above, which puts mid-1920s compositions in dialogue, and which also counts as a (mostly) Russian Futurist album.
The album features a good performance of Prokofiev's Third Symphony and also includes Alexander Mosolov's Iron Foundry and Edgard Varèse's Arcana.
Prokofiev composed his Symphony No. 3 in 1928, Iron Foundry was written in 1926 or 1927 and Arcana was written 1925-1927, so all of the music dates to about the same period. And it's good that Chailly took the occasion to introduce Mosolov to listeners who might only have known about Prokofiev and Varèse.
Other good Chailly albums include two Shostakovich recordings: The Jazz Album and The Film Album.
Man, I don't know Prokofiev's Symphonies except for the first one. My Uncle John had a cassette of that symphony that my dad gave me when Uncle John died around 1984. I listened to that cassette a ton.
ReplyDelete@Eric, Prokofiev's first and fifth symphonies are the most popular and seem to be the ones that get recorded the most, although I confess I like the third and the sixth, which are a bit more "out there." Need to listen to the second again, to see if I still love it, too.
ReplyDeleteBut perhaps my favorite Prokofiev orchestral works at the piano concertos. I listen to the second and the third over and over again.