Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin: Ballet for the ears – culture
Cinderella is like the young Doris from Irmgard Keun’s Weimar Republic novel “The Artificial Silk Girl”: She wants to be “a shine”, something special, also wants to wear beautiful clothes like rich city women, dance in the glow of the chandelier – and then find their princes.
At least when it comes to Sergei Prokofiev’s setting of the old fairy tale material, this comparison does not apply to the Rapunzel braid: because at the beginning of the 1940s he composed music for his “Cinderella” that seems very urban, contemporary in the best sense of the word, without to break the boundaries of traditional tonality. The full-length ballet was premiered in the mega-metropolis of Moscow, but it quickly found widespread use in capitalist countries as well. And there also enticed the viewers to dream of social advancement.
Prokofiev’s music is harshly beautiful
The optical component, the perceptual perception always the sensory perception, is lost in the concert performance of the two score that Vladimir Jurowski realizes with the radio symphony orchestra in the Philharmonie. There is something missing, but without the seductive power of dance, there is also the opportunity to listen more closely, to delve into Prokofiev’s style.
The Russian composer is one of the cold-blooded composers, his works are harshly beautiful. Silver tones dominate, the music shimmers like metal, matt like pewter, iridescent like brushed aluminum, sparkling like stainless steel. 50 shades of grey Can be found here, but always in the finest execution, such as the handicrafts of the Art Deco style that inspired aesthetes all over the world from France in the interwar period.
The RSB succeeds in an ideal interpretation
Vladimir Jurowski coolly celebrates Prokofiev’s cool elegance, as he lets his RSB play in the largest line-up: the sound is so rich, physical, the collective fortissimo achieves glaring brightness values. At the same time, however, the conductor ensures that. The effect never becomes massive, that. The architecture of the musical composition remains transparent, straightforward, clearly structured. Rhythmic precision, sharply contoured melodic lines, stylistic sovereignty – the RSB succeeds in an ideal interpretation of “Cinderella”.
For Irmgard Keun’s artificial silk girl, the search for a prince in Berlin in 1932 ended unhappily. In the end Doris, destitute and homeless, had to crawl into a peddler’s gazebo. Very few Cinderella stories end up as fairy tales.