The Love for Three Oranges, Suite, Op. 33bis

Program notes

About the Work

Prokofiev’s opera The Love for Three Oranges is a gleeful absurdist comedy. Based on an eighteenth-century fairy-tale play by Carlo Gozzi, it tells of a hypochondriac prince cursed to fall in love with three oranges, and is full of magicians, card games and theatrical self-mockery. Prokofiev wrote it for Chicago, where it premiered in 1921, and from its sparkling score he drew a concert suite of six movements that has long outshone the opera itself in popularity. It catches Prokofiev at his most witty, brilliant and acerbic, fresh from his early years as the enfant terrible of Russian music.

The suite’s most famous number by far is the March, a quirky, strutting, sardonic little tune that became one of Prokofiev’s signature pieces (for years it was the theme of the American radio drama The FBI in Peace and War). Around it the suite gathers other vivid episodes from the opera: eerie magic, grotesque comedy and brilliant orchestral colour. It makes a bright, characterful opening to Noseda’s Russian programme.

What to Listen For

Listen above all for the famous March, which you may well recognise: a jaunty, slightly sinister tune with a clipped, marching rhythm and Prokofiev’s trademark ‘wrong-note’ wit, brassy and irresistible. The Scherzo that follows is all glittering, scurrying activity, conjuring the opera’s magic and mischief.

Across the suite’s six short movements, listen for Prokofiev’s brilliant, sardonic orchestration and his love of the grotesque and the comic: sudden contrasts, mock-pompous fanfares, eerie atmospheres for the opera’s sorcerers, and splashes of bright colour. It is music of theatrical flair and sharp humour, a perfect curtain-raiser, and a reminder of why Prokofiev was considered the wittiest of the great twentieth-century Russians.