The Opera Tattler
Reviews of Performances and their Audiences
Category: War and Peace
-
The penultimate performance of Prokofiev’s War and Peace this season at the Met is tonight, and how I wish I could go, if only to see the enormous sparkly red chicken puppet again. Also, I read in the Financial Times that the production features 4 live chickens, in addition to a horse, a dog, and…
-
At the moment I am reading the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace. Though I attended a performance of Prokofiev’s opera at the Met a few years ago, I stubbornly refused to read the titles. Thus I did not manage to piece together the plot, as my Russian skills are minimal, so the book has…
-
Last Monday I went to see Prokofiev’s War and Peace at the Metropolitan Opera. Ordinarily I would avoid Prokofiev (1891-1953) altogether, his music is too modern for my conventional sensibilities. Also, Tolstoy himself despised opera, calling it a pernicious, corrupt art form, an ungainly mixing of different modalities of art. However, my friends wanted to…
The Opera Tattler 