Nimbus: NI5662/3

Prokofiev: Ivan The Terrible

Recorded in Moscow in 1998 this is the first complete recording of Prokofiev's music for Sergei Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible, composed between 1942 and 1945. Until now the music has only ever been heard in the 1962 oratorio arrangement by Abram Stasevich which has left an incomplete and inaccurate impression of Prokofiev's plans. In 1997 a new edition was published, the result of painstaking work by the Glinka State Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow and the publishers Sikorski Edition in Hamburg. Not only does this provide the complete music which Prokofiev wrote in its original orchestration - in the correct sequence to follow the episodes of Eisenstein's film - but it also includes the music from the Russian orthodox liturgy which was selected by Prokofiev and Eisenstein to accompany many of the ceremonial scenes.