Sergei Prokofiev’s Grandson is a Badass
July 27th, 2007 Posted in classical music, prokofiev, youtube
I was just reading this piece in the Guardian which is a review of ‘classical music for the hoodie generation’, at the Scala in London. That’s the Scala, not La Scala. Anyway, it was a performance of Prokofiev’s Concerto for Turntables (and snippets of a performance here) The astute might’ve guessed that it wasn’t a piece by the old Prokofiev, but a newer more shiny one. His grandson, actually, Gabriel Prokofiev.
It turns out that Gabriel is all about blending electronica with classical setups, as in the piece mentioned above in which a chamber orchestra competes with a DJ on a deck as the soloist. I can’t say that I really like it much (at least from the brief snatches in that video), unfortunately, as much as I’d like to sound avant garde.
I’m a big old fan of electronic music (most of my non-classical collection is in that kind of genre) but the turntableist, scratching kind of stuff sounds so harsh over the top of an orchestra. An even more horrible example of this painful kind of interference is here.
Gabriel P. also wrote at least a couple of non-turntable-messed-up pieces. These actually sound listenable. They’re spiky and modern and actually sort of sound a bit like electronica played by string quartet, which might not be terribly surprising since he seems to be into that kind of thing. There are a couple of camcorderesque videos on youtube of his dance and last movement of his string quartet. Additionally, the Elysian Quartet (who are intriguing themselves, and might be hot) have a performance on their website here.
