Prokofiev: he was only obeying orders

IN 1936 Sergei Prokofiev returned to Russia from Paris: a hopeful homecoming which had the consequence, inevitable as it now seems, that the composer ended his years writing cantatas with titles like Flourish Mighty Homeland and works that celebrated "the joy of construction that now seizes our entire people". It's sad that Prokofiev and Shostakovich - who also kept within the pale of Stalinist approval by doing his bit for Soviet reafforestation and the like - never hit it off and shared the awfulness of their predicament. Relations were frigid - cold enough for Prokofiev's son to take pleasure recently in retelling an old Moscow story about Shostakovich's reading habits. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was surprised one night in his apartment, seated alone, beneath a pool of light. His visitor sneaked a look at his book. It was the official biography of Stalin, the only one ...

Unkind, but passions ran understandably high back then. These days the works that Prokofiev and Shostakovich sweated out against their wills are occasionally performed to tickle our jaded curiosity. At the Barbican last Sunday the LSO played The Meeting of the Volga and the Don, Prokofiev's celebration of the Volga-Don canal project. It sounded pretty bad. Theme succeeded theme, each decked out with whatever trapping of memorability came easiest to hand - sweeping grandeur, counterpoint on piccolo, you name it - but each, crushingly, less memorable than the last. Somewhere, one trusted, lurked irony. The glockenspiel was a touch cheeky, perhaps? The piano added a subversive bite? One remained uncertain until the end. But then, no doubting it: a mocking, repeated militaristic crash-bang that was as good as an explicit "up yours!". Didn't Stalin notice?

No such anxieties were needed with the other Prokofiev of the evening: the Second Violin Concerto, played by Maxim Vengerov. The winner of last year's Gramophone Record of the Year award (for a CD of Prokofiev's First Concerto, also conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich), Vengerov is a rebuke to all who respond to cries of "great new young instrumentalist shock" by reaching for their Jascha Heifetz 78s. Aged just 22, he is hot. Or, rather, he is cool: with a modern technique allied to an old-time style. Over-emphatic on occasion, his richness of tone and shaping of phrase would convert the severest hype-doubter. As the glassy, classical melody of Prokofiev's slow movement moved ecstatically higher, there was a perfect meeting of composer's intention and soloist's execution, and one caught one's breath. Rostropovich, great soul though he is, was sadly off colour: leaving the orchestra to create their own lines and reach their own conclusions. Still, the triplet of burning Russian kisses he planted on Vengerov's cheeks the moment the music stopped was edifying to behold.

Later in the week the Barbican Hall contained an orchestra - that of the Opera National de Lyon - on distinct good form, conducted with panache. Opera-house orchestras are used to standing or falling by their responsiveness or otherwise to a conductor, and these French players were on the restless qui vive. Under Kent Nagano's pondered yet sprightly direction, their playing (as far as Massenet's Werther allowed it) was electrifying, having the virtue, paradoxical to Anglo-Saxons, of being both deeply sensual and studiously restrained.

Whether the singing would rise to this level one initially doubted. Werther - Jerry Hadley - strode on with the assurance of a cocky blighter from Puccini, and confided his first glimmerings of love for Charlotte at the top of his voice, completely missing the French ethos. By Act III, however, Massenet is rising above himself and one aria, Charlotte's air des larmes, fairly chokes one with its Handelian pathos - not that Handel would have given an obbligato part to the saxophone, of course. Anne Sofie von Otter portrayed Charlotte with elder-sisterly gravitas rising to womanly passion, singing with eyes glued to the score yet considerable skill. Young sister Sophie - Virginie Pochon - was winsome; the Bailli (Jean-Marie Fremeau) gave a lesson in French declamation; and Werther turned into a poet after all.

A Spaniard, of Franco-Swiss descent, resident latterly in England, Roberto Gerhard is that oddest thing, a forgotten composer (he died in 1970) who happens to be doing famously. The Proms had his melodrama The Plague, Radio 3 is playing pieces weekly, and - last Wednesday, the centenary of his birth - the Wigmore Hall had a tribute. In a pre-concert talk Meirion Bowen offered a tautology to explain Gerhard's continuing residence in oblivion. With publishers unwilling to print his scores, went the argument, with record companies running a mile, with just a single study of his music in print (and that in Catalan), is it any wonder that Gerhard is ignored?

Rephrase the question and you get a statement: Roberto Gerhard is ignored because he is ignored. And when that's the story, valid reasons are often close behind. A pupil of Schoenberg in the 1920s, Gerhard kept up with the times. In the 1960s - when the composer was in his seventies - he was chatting with Cage in America and studying Stockhausen in Europe. But these chaps were the avant garde; Gerhard was - and his later works remain - passe. The Concert for Eight of 1961, in a fine performance by the Nash Ensemble, said it all. A chap scraped beneath the piano lid; a double bassist knocked, scratched and hit his instrument; a percussionist played his cymbals as if they were a cello. Its six sections, based on the 12-tone series, exploited tone, colour and timbre with skill and judgement. Musical logic? Present and correct, but not for our ears. Later, Rosemary Hardy sang songs from Gerhard's Spanish, pre-Schoenberg days. Generous, gentle, sweetly orchestrated, they made me, at least, weep for what might have been. Their very lack of tutored sophistication seemed a golden promise.

Michael White returns next week.