#sovietmusic

Soviet bootleg bone music - vinyls made of repurposed Xrays

https://www.x-rayaudio.com/

Sergei Prokofiev died on 5 March 1953 from a brain hemorrhage. He was 61 years old. As it was the same day (and hour, purportedly) of Stalin's death, Prokofiev's death went practically unnoticed. His official obituary was not even published until two weeks later (18 March 1953) in the journal Sovetskoye iskusstvo. There weren’t even enough flowers for his funeral since they were all bought for Stalin. The silence surrounding Prokofiev's death always deeply saddens me, since his life was already so stifled by Soviet politics and censorship.  Prof. Simon Morrison, in his book on Prokofiev, The People's Artist (Oxford, 2009), has given us a picture of Prokofiev’s funeral:

The March 7 memorial service at the House of Composers (Dom kompozitorov) was a modest affair. Khrennikov attended to the logistics. Shostakovich spoke; Oistrakh performed two movements from the 1946 Violin Sonata; the pianist Samuil Feynberg, Oistrakh's accompanist, performed additional pieces by by Bach. Fifteen people attended Prokofiev’s internment at Novodevichye cemetery. Flowers were in short supply in Moscow; a photograph of the deceased composer preserved at the Russian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography in Krasnogorsk shows the casket surrounded by potted plants. These had been brought by a sympathetic neighbor to the memorial service from her apartment, the blooms alive rather than dead. The composer Alfred Schnittke reimagined the funeral procession from a later, safer position in the twentieth century: “Along an almost deserted street that ran parallel to the seething mass hysterically mourning the passing of Stalin, there moved in the opposite direction a small group of people bearing on their shoulders the coffin of the greatest composer of the time…. I regard this picture as symbolic. To move against the tide in those days was hopeless. Yet even there was—just as in earlier ages—the possibility of a choice between two decisions, only one of which was right.” However fanciful—some of Prokofiev’s pallbearers, Atovmyan included, were true political insiders—Schnittke’s glasnost’-era sentiments are apt. Prokofiev resisted the current in death as in life. (pp. 388-89)

Let us take a moment to remember this composer’s life, and the beauty that he brought into this world, amidst circumstances so dark. I’ll let him speak for himself, through the 2nd movement (Andante assai) of his Second Violin Concerto (Op. 63, 1935):

Rest in peace, Sergei Sergeevich. Вечная память.