Prokofiev and Shostakovich under Stalin: Notes of dissent

The South Bank's series on Prokofiev and Shostakovich under Stalin was a fascinating exercise - but even-handed it wasn't, says Edward Seckerson

"Prokofiev and Shostakovich under Stalin". It seemed a timely series. At least for two of its three protagonists. Perversely, the fates decreed that Sergei Prokofiev share his deathday (5 March 1953, 50 years ago) with the tyrant in his own backyard. A cruel irony. Celebrating one forever invokes the other. Eternally inseparable.

According to official records, Prokofiev died only hours before Stalin. Shostakovich, one can't help feeling, would have hung on. A fanciful notion, I know, but one that may have crossed the mind of the series director, Vladimir Ashkenazy. Looking back at nearly a month of concerts, it's fair to ask: had the dice not been loaded in Shostakovich's favour?

The central idea for the series at the Royal Festival Hall was a simple one. Compare and contrast the approach of two great composers living and working under a highly oppressive regime. Juxtapose the "Party" pieces – the propaganda – with the personal. Ascertain who is the better liar. That presupposes, of course, that we are talking about like-minded personalities – which we are not. Prokofiev was a romantic idealist. His imagination and idiosyncrasy knew no bounds; fantasy was his forte. "Soviet Realism", with its own implicit irony, was not such a stretch for him. He kept his politics well hidden. Shostakovich, on the other hand, saw only the consequences of those politics, the awful contradiction between "realism" and "reality", Soviet or otherwise.

Could he have written a score as vivid and fertile in its invention for a film as jingoistically self-serving as Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky? I doubt it. Ashkenazy launched the series with William David Brohn's performing version, the score liberated from its scratchy 1939 soundtrack and played live against a screening of the monochrome film projected behind and above the Philharmonia Orchestra, effectively turning the Festival Hall into a Hollywood soundstage. Ashkenazy kept his eye on a large clock to the left of the podium, occasionally pulling back or speeding up to get the synchronisation right.

William David Brohn, a Broadway arranger and orchestrator, knows a thing or two about timing. He goes in hard. Prokofiev and Eisenstein disagreed about what kind of music should accompany the credits. They ended up with nothing at all. Brohn, with the benefit of hindsight and a lot of intuition, lifted the big ice-breaking moment from the seven-movement cantata that Prokofiev unveiled shortly after the film's premiere.

Actually, I'd still far rather hear the cantata. The fragmentation of the score in its filmic guise never really gives an orchestra of the Philharmonia's calibre a decent run at the music, and Ashkenazy was frankly hampered by a pretty threadbare Brighton Festival Chorus. Excellent contralto, though. Lilli Paasikivi surveyed the battlefield dead and dying with genuine pathos. The authorities saw Nevsky as Prokofiev's rehabilitation after years in exile. They didn't reckon on his humanity.

I still say, though, that Ashkenazy loaded the dice. Among a handful of Shostakovich masterpieces where were Prokofiev's? The programme twinning two of Prokofiev's most blatant "Party pieces" – the "Festive Poem", The Meeting of the Volga and the Don and the oratorio, On Guard for Peace – with Shostakovich's great Violin Concerto No 1 was unfair on Prokofiev and unfair on the audience. The former piece, celebrating the construction of Stalin's ecologically disastrous Moscow Canal, at least had the virtue of open-hearted tunes, the first of them trumpet-led and as guileless as those "happy proletariat" posters, in which workers are depicted as yesterday's heroes with tomorrow's dreams. It's a piece that sounds as though it is ending a full minute or so before it actually does – doubtless to ensure that Stalin would know when it did.

But the real stinker here was On Guard for Peace – wallpaper politics masquerading as art. Lilli Paasikivi all but took up the megaphone for a series of empty declamations. So, too, did the conductor in a prerecorded passage where the text must have acted upon his sensibilities like an emetic. Imagine a beautiful lullaby – Prokofiev at his most shadowy sweet – underpinning these chilling words: "They are led by the children's best friend/ And he lives in the Kremlin." Adds a whole new dimension to the concept of child abuse.

Moving swiftly on, there is more music in the cadenza of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto than there is in the whole of On Guard for Peace. Again, unfair advantage? Vadim Repin played it with determination. A little too austere, a little too "Soviet" to begin with, his square jaw in line with his square, somewhat "contained" phrasing. But come that extraordinary passage in the first movement where the soloist, like the proverbial lark ascending, is poleaxed by tam-tam and tuba from the lower depths, I began to appreciate the thinking behind Repin's approach. This is a piece so personal that Shostakovich hid it until after Stalin's death. Maybe, just maybe, you need to keep some distance from it.

Gidon Kremer doesn't keep his distance from anything. In the Second Violin Concerto, a bitter postscript from the late Sixties, the fallout from his performance might have been even greater had he played the piece from memory. But this was still edgy, unsettling stuff. Parched, brittle, obsessive, expression here is cut to the bone, all beauty vanquished. Prokofiev was vanquished from this final concert. Shostakovich had the last word. Or rather, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose unflinching poetry provided the backbone for Symphony No 13, Babi-Yar.

Ashkenazy may have loaded the dice for the series but he threw a double-six with this performance. The Kirov bass Anatoli Kotscherga towered over it, the London Philharmonic Choir picked up on his authority, and this masterpiece roared and whispered its disgust as if traversing the cemetery of Stalin's conceits.

Looking at the poster for the series, it is Stalin's image that dominates. His ghost still haunts the music that rose up to challenge him. Towards the end of Shostakovich's 13th Symphony, are these words by Yevtushenko: "Forgotten are those who hurled curses; but we remember those who were cursed." But do we really want to remember Prokofiev for works such as On Guard for Peace? Compared to Shostakovich, Ashkenazy has given him a poor showing in this series. As one who suffered himself under the Soviet system, no one could blame Ashkenazy for identifying more with Shostakovich's moral fibre than Prokofiev's escapism. But the inclusion of at least one Prokofiev masterpiece – the Sixth Symphony, say – would have made us think twice about his apparent compliance.