"Alexander Nevsky": Adventure on a grand scale

Performance review |

For those of us who last saw Sergei Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky" via 16mm print in a high school film class, or maybe on DVD at home, watching it on a sizable screen at Benaroya Hall is, well, something else.

Watching it while the entire Seattle Symphony Orchestra, mezzo-soprano Kathryn Weld, conductor Xian Zhang and the Seattle Symphony Chorale recreate Sergei Prokofiev's grand score for the 1938 film is nothing less than an adventure.

The symphony and Seattle International Film Festival have teamed up to take audiences at Benaroya on just such an adventure for SIFF's final weekend. The event, a screening of "Nevsky" with full musical complement, premiered Thursday and takes place again Friday through Sunday.

It is not a knock against this special program to say it is neither a truly cinematic experience nor an entirely musical one. There are certainly times when the film and symphony get in each other's way, but that's only a problem for purists expecting primarily one thing or another.

What's really happening is that this "Nevsky" program is a unique project focused on the underappreciated relationship between Eisenstein's images and Prokofiev's score. The experience works best if you allow the film and music to serve as references for one another.

The two extraordinary Russian artists teamed up to make "Nevsky," pleasing an anti-Hitler Stalin by filming the tale of a 13th century Russian prince (Nikolai Cherkasov) who leads a peasant army against invading Germans.

Eisenstein and Prokofiev established "Nevsky's" required nationalist tone through a close collaboration between film and music. But they also achieved some unorthodox storytelling passages the same way, and employed progressive ideas about movie scores inspired by Hollywood.

"Nevsky's" poorly-recorded soundtrack obscured those accomplishments. It is the symphony's objective to clarify and, literally, amplify them using orchestration closer to Prokofiev's later cantata of the soundtrack.

The symphony does precisely that with a beautiful rendering of the modified score. More than ever, those moments when Prokofiev intentionally overstates, understates or contradicts the emotional pitch of a scene create an enthralling tension. When he writes almost comical, Disneyesque music for images of battlefield mayhem, the result is an explosion of emotional colors.

It's fun to see Seattle Symphony musicians craning their necks to look up at the movie screen between moments of playing. Their close partnership with the film honors the fruitful teamwork of Eisenstein and Prokofiev, and that's what this program is about.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com