Peter and The Wolf
In 1936, Natalya Sats asked Sergei Prokofiev to write a work that would teach orchestral instruments to children and fit the "musical tastes in children from the first years of school." The composer, who had recently returned to Russia after 13 years abroad, wrote his symphonic fairy tale in a couple of weeks.
The first performance of Peter and the Wolf was on May 2, 1936; Prokofiev later wrote that the debut was "inauspicious at best" and the work "failed to attract much attention."
Yet although it is generally not considered among Prokofiev's greatest compositions, it has become one of the most frequently recorded classical work. To date there have been more than 400 different recordings in more than a dozen languages.
Natalya Sats first narrated Peter and the Wolf in 1936. She would go on to give more than 300 performances. The first time she narrated it in English was in Albany, New York as part of a 1986 cultural exchange of theater troupes.
Eleanor Roosevelt, David Bowie, Sir Alec Guinness, Sophia Loren, Zero Mostel, and Boris Karloff have all recorded narrations of Peter and the Wolf.
Read more about this topic: Natalya Sats Musical Theater
Famous quotes containing the words peter and/or wolf:
“The concept of a person is logically prior to that of an individual consciousness. The concept of a person is not to be analysed as that of an animated body or an embodied anima.”
—Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (b. 1919)
“‘O opportunity! thy guilt is great,
‘Tis thou that execut’st the traitor’s treason;
Thou set’st the wolf where he the lamb may get;
Whoever plots the sin, thou point’st the season;
‘Tis thou that spurn’st at right, at law, at reason;
And in thy shady cell, where none may spy him,
Sits Sin to seize the souls that wander by him.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)