In a contest to see who could write the most risqué opera of the '20s,
Sergey Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel may have won the prize. After
Strauss' Salome, with its homicidal hoochie-coochie dance, the excesses of sexual pathology exhibited in contemporary operas reached an appalling new depth with The Fiery Angel. A study of erotic obsession culminating with an orgy in a nunnery, The Fiery Angel had everything going for it except greatness.
Prokofiev's plot is smeared in sweat: its characters' assorted deviancies and its blasphemous blending of the sexual and spiritual defy decency and deny morality.
Prokofiev's score is soaked in blood: its jagged melodies, slashing rhythms, and brazen orchestrations tear at the ears and rip at the viscera. But ultimately,
Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel is nothing more than an obscene noise with no art to its music, only artifice, and no humanity to its characters, only caricature. Consequently, there have been very few performances and fewer recordings of The Fiery Angel. While by no means the worst recording -- there's a pirate recording that might be of Bulgarian origin that sounds like it was recorded on concrete -- this 1991 recording with
Neeme Järvi leading the
Gothenburg Symphony is surely a close second. Considering the excruciating difficulty of the writing, the singers, especially those in the smaller roles, are close to tolerable. But the performance directed by
Neeme Järvi is nowhere near tolerable: while the orchestra plays dutifully,
Järvi indulges in every whim and yields to every temptation, and the result makes the listener wish to cover his/her ears in agony. DG's digital recording is clean and vivid.