A Prodigal Son Returns

Donald Macleod explores Prokofiev's triumphant - and ultimately tragic - return to the USSR. Featuring a complete performance of the classic musical fable Peter and the Wolf, narrated by Prokofiev's first wife Lina.

Sergei Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin; there were no flowers left for his funeral. It was the grimly ironic end to a return to his Russian motherland that had begun in triumph in the mid-1930s and descended terrifyingly quickly into a fight for his life, in the face of the state's purges of artists and intellectuals. This week, Donald Macleod explores a host of masterpieces - including Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, War and Peace, Alexander Nevsky and the Sixth Symphony - leading to Prokofiev's final, devastating denunciation by the cultural commissars in 1948, a blow from which his music and health would never recover.

Donald Macleod begins the week with a perplexing question: why did Prokofiev choose to return to Russia at the height of Stalin's Great Terror: a time when artists, intellectuals and cultural figures (not least, Prokofiev's fellow composer Dmitri Shostakovich) lived in fear of their lives? Donald introduces a complete performance of Prokofiev's much-loved children's tale Peter and the Wolf (for which the composer wrote the story as well as music), narrated by Prokofiev's first wife Lina - herself a survivor of eight years in the Gulag.

Prokofiev: Troika (Lieutenant Kijé) (arr Chiu)
Frederick Chiu (piano)

Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No 2 in G minor (II. Andante assai)
Janine Jansen, violin
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski, conductor

Prokofiev, arr Rozhdestvensky: The Queen of Spades - Liza; Boris Godunov - Polonaise, Scene at the Fountain (Pushkiniana)
Russian State Symphony Orchestra
Dmitry Yablonsky, conductor

Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf
Lina Prokofiev, speaker
Scottish National Orchestra
Neeme Järvi, conductor.