in the west, prokofiev is known mostly for his ballets, so this is a little bit of a curve for me. i guess it's closer to something i could get into, but i find a lot of late romantic or neo-classical music to suffer from this same kind of aesthetic defect - it's like the composer has this brutal case of add, and just can't focus on a coherent idea. it's easy to spin that around on me "you're not following it", and to an extent that's fair, but who wants to follow a rambling, twenty minute long monopohonic movement that just fizzles out in the end? maybe it's the journey; maybe it's how you got there. but, i need some kind of process, some kind of counterpoint, some kind of something. just barfing a bunch of notes on to the page really isn't enough for me. the crescendo at the end doesn't save it, if it just pops up out of nowhere, and for no reason.
so, i kind of almost wish it was prancing russian unicorns. as it is, this just hits me as aimless and pointless, but that is a criticism that i would direct rather broadly at the style, which i wouldn't even really consider prokofiev to be a dominant representative of; if you were to attack this as being overly buttoned-up or tastelessly bourgeois, i'd say you'd largely be correct in your denunciation.
i actually have a longstanding hate-on for mozart as representative of everything wrong with the world; if i was going to ban a list of composers for being formulaic, mozart would be first on the list, but i'd rather denounce and criticize than actually ban. it's funny how often "he was just a kid, though" is used to gloss over the formulaic aspects of his writing. but, then you keep performing it. why?
as is generally the case with mozart, i really have no use for this - it sounds like engineering homework. it's not art...
this is a little more interesting, but it's kind of over before it starts, so while i'm at least not able to slam it for being aimless, i'm not really getting anything from it, either. i'd like to hear a longer piece from this composer that delves into a more romantic style use of dynamics, as is toyed at here, while banging out these scandinavian jazz riffs. so, it could go somewhere, or it could not. but, it's just a proof of concept, as it is.
