Rick Mabry wrote:

>Richard Todd wrote:
>
>>By the way, if you want to get your feet wet in Prokofiev operas, I'd
>>suggest that the Fiery Angel is his masterpiece in the genre.  If you look
>>hard enough you can even find a good video production of it on a now
>>discontinued Philips VHS.
>
>Or the Gergiev/Kirov Opera DVD from Arthaus Musik:

I did indeed obtain a DVD copy PAL only, regions 2/5.  I used a search
"thing" to find the best U.K. price and was very happy with both the
price and service I got from Benson.  This performance under Gergiev
with all Russian singers and production by David Freeman was most
fascinating and a new experience for me.

This leads me to more Prokofiev questions.

(1) What was the language in which the commissioned Chicago premiere of
_Love for Three Oranges_ was given?

I note that there are both a Gergiev Russian CD recording and a Nagano
French DVD. I would much prefer Russian but I like DVDs for operas new
to me.  I also do not in my limited experience respond to Nagano very
much.

(2) I have revisited a Chant du Monde Prokofiev CD of Alexandre Nevski
(Svetlanov with the wonderful mezzo of Larissa Avdeyeva), Zdravitsa (the
first "revised" text) under Svetlanov, and Ils sont Sept (everything is
labelled in French; this is Seven, they are Seven) under Rojdestvenski.

Here is the problem:

No texts and the website that has the Nevsky text is not available.  For
Zdravista I have another recording which uses a new revised text, further
politically correct for our times, and this one has a English only text,
something that I always consider better than nothing in this day of
textless CDs.

For Seven, they are Seven, I have no idea what transpires and I find
this work very impressive indeed.

Recently I picked up Muti's recording of Ivan the Terrible, happily with
three wonderful Russian soloists (if with an English chorus) on EMI and
again no texts of any sort.

So, in conclusion, any advice of _Love for Three Oranges_ and any help
on the textlessness would both be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Yoel