MUSIC CHRONICLE
PROKOFIEV'S THREE ORANGES
The New York City Opera Company deserves a good bit of
praise for having refreshed our memories and renewed our acquaintance
with Sergei Prokofiev's gay opera
The Love for Three Oranges.
At
least the audience of its recent performance seemed to think so. It looked
happy and gratified after having laughed itself out in the Moorish mau–
soleum of the City Center. Indeed, the enthusiastic applause and cheer–
ing at the final curtain were well merited by the company. The singing,
acting, the playing of the orchestra and the con.ducting were excep–
tionally good, surpassed only by the skillful and imaginative production,
or rather, conception of the opera devised by Mr. Fedor Komissarjev–
sky and realized by Mr. Vladimir Rosing. The decor and the costumes by
Mr. Dobujinski were in good taste and quite suitable to the Commedia
dell'Arte (via the Russian cabaret) conception of Prokofiev's musical
comedy. One felt that everyone from the singers to the audience, in–
cluding Mr. Halasz, the director-conductor of the company, who grinned
throughout the performance, had had a fine time.
Prokofiev's
Love for Three Oranges
is now twenty-eight years old
and is still as merry, boisterous and carefree as it appeared to its
first audience in Chicago in 1921. Those who saw that first production
say that the public then didn't laugh quite as much as it does now, but
this is, I imagine, because the opera was performed in Chicago in a
pigeon-French translation. Here it was given in an adequate, though not
always correct, English version prepared by Mr. Victor Serov.
The Love for Thre e Oranges
is the work of a young man green
from Russia and its young revolution, a man full of freshness and talent,
who wants to be free, have fun, poke fun and make fun. Untouched by
the lyrical introspection of French post-impressionism and unconcerned
with the many neuroses of Central Europe, Prokofiev's oranges roll
around freely on the counhyside of Russian fairy-tale opera and operetta.
The music of the
Oranges
drives the listener across the fields and valleys
made familiar by Messrs. Rimsky-Korsakov
(Tzar Saltan
and
The Gold–
en Cockerel)
and Baliev, the cabaret entertainer, godfather of the late
Chauve Souris.
With Prokofiev, however, the drive is bumpier, roughel',
