Prokofiev wrote Betrothal in a Monastery in less than three months, in the midst of the turmoil of 1940. The opera is similar in some ways to his only other comedy, Love for Three Oranges, written in 1919. They are based on nearly contemporaneous late eighteenth century plays with plots that are patently absurd, for which Prokofiev provided music of matching whimsicality. Both scores are jumpy, kaleidoscopic, and unpredictable. Love for Three Oranges is a fairy tale and its music is altogether spikier, while Betrothal in a ...
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Prokofiev wrote Betrothal in a Monastery in less than three months, in the midst of the turmoil of 1940. The opera is similar in some ways to his only other comedy, Love for Three Oranges, written in 1919. They are based on nearly contemporaneous late eighteenth century plays with plots that are patently absurd, for which Prokofiev provided music of matching whimsicality. Both scores are jumpy, kaleidoscopic, and unpredictable. Love for Three Oranges is a fairy tale and its music is altogether spikier, while Betrothal in a Monastery, a comedy of manners set in Seville, is clearly late Prokofiev, with the idiom of Romeo and Juliet crazily skewed and fragmented. In the later opera, the music is consistently zany and entertaining, but it really takes off in the third and fourth acts and becomes genuinely memorable. This recording is taken from a 2006 Glyndebourne production directed by Daniel Slater and Robert Innes Hopkins that must have been a blast based on the frequent explosions of audience laughter....
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