WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln - Prokofiev: Cinderella, Op. 87 (2000)

In November 1945, the premiere of Sergei Prokofiev's new ballet "Cinderella" took place in the Moscov Bolshoi Theater. It was an immediate success, which was repeated in Leningrad a short time later. After the fool and the love for the three oranges, Prokofiev had once again returned to a fairy tale - and again he had achieved a great success, which offered even the most dogmatic minds of the Kremlin no means of protesting. On the contrary, the fate of the exploited girl was excellently exploited to "prove" the eternal, historical yearning of all peoples for the blessings of Marxist-Leninist ideology. The only fatal thing is that the "naïve" Prokofiev, who believed so much in this and other fairy tales, with his article written at the time of the first performance, referred all political readings to the realm of the fable: "What I wanted to put into music first of all , is the romantic love of Cinderella and the Prince in the tradition of the old classical ballet, with pas de deux, gavotte, waltzes, bourrée, mazurka and canter. "It is certainly Prokofiev's most energetic, most danceable ballet, and it is difficult to understand that it is still in the shadow of Romeo and Juliet. We want to remedy this with a brilliant new recording with the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne under the Prokofiev specialist Mikhail Jurowski.