Alexander Nevsky

Alexander Nevsky: An Army Triumphs!

Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film about the 13th-century Russian hero Alexander Nevsky was an epic work that demanded an epic score. In Sergei Prokofiev, Eisenstein found the perfect collaborator, and the two Sergeis created a sweeping, dramatic opus that set the standard for all future film scores. The film paints a picture of Russia under siege, caught between the Mongol hordes to the east and a Teutonic Christian force invading from the west, seemingly hellbent on conquering all of Russia. Under Nevsky's charismatic leadership, the Russian commoners and few princes fend off the Germans in a long, bloody contest. The film is brilliantly evocative yet always human, and Prokofiev's score is often awe-inspiring and thrilling, alternatively plaintive and simple. Throughout, the music is breathtaking.

This finale to the symphony's 2002-2003 classical concert series, then, saw a fine combination of live orchestral performance and attendant film. In Austin this is nothing new: For years, Frank Speller literally pulled out all the stops to accompany The Phantom of the Opera on UT's Visser-Rowland organ at the annual Halloween frightfest, and groups like the Golden Arm Trio and Brown Whörnet (and their myriad co-conspirators) have performed live scores for any number of films. But this outing dwarfed anything of its kind locally. For a story of vast armies with an orchestral score that calls for scores of musicians and chorus, the Austin Symphony assembled an army of its own, with support from the Conspirare chorus. Perhaps as many as 200 artists crowded the Bass stage for this mammoth undertaking. The general who marshaled all these artistic forces? Maestro Peter Bay, with choral leadership from Craig Hella Johnson.

The music commenced even before the credits ran -- in the good old days, there was no music under a film's opening credits -- with Bay equipped at his podium with not only the score and a monitor of the film, projected on a screen above the orchestra, but a large clock to help him keep time with the film unwinding overhead. The crashes and clangs on enormous chimes offered an immediate foreshadowing of the clashes to come, and the sweeping strings echoed the vast landscapes and cold, clear skies of the Russian winter beautifully stark in Eisenstein's film. Prokofiev's score does much more than set the mood; it is a narrative device in its own right, and Eisenstein allows huge chunks of film to progress dialogue-free with the music telling the story.

So in passages such as "The 13th Century" and "The Teutonic Camp," images and music are all that are needed to move the story forward. The battle sequences encompass seven different musical movements, with a variety of sonic attacks, all deftly handled by Bay and orchestra. Guest mezzo-soprano Rose Taylor lent a haunting voice to the post-battle "Field of the Dead," with the camera content to wander among the strewn bodies of men, women, and horses, and all their assorted inert weaponry. If "Pskov: Procession of the Fallen and Judgment of the Prisoners" was a bit chaotic, bouncing back and forth between the trumpeting grandeur of the victors and the doleful morbidity of the defeated, the concluding chorus was brilliantly defiant and replete with awesome power. The film was a thinly veiled warning to the Nazis -- modern crusading Teutons -- that any foray into Russia would be met with resistance not seen since Prince Alexander's day. Talk about foreshadowing!

Prokofiev's score set the standard for all future movie scores, indeed, and as the vast work unfolded, the listener could recognize several passages lifted -- or, perhaps lifted is too pejorative, let's say, echoed or lovingly re-created -- and plopped down into any number of subsequent film scores. (John Williams, oh, the things you have yet to learn.) Yet despite the occasional familiar section, Prokofiev's work is too intricate, too complete, too overwhelming, to lose anything to future composers' homages. In the hands of Peter Bay, the Austin Symphony, and Conspirare, the musical outcome was never in doubt, and an intriguing and creative symphony season came to a resolute and stirring conclusion.