Prokofiev Rediscovered: The Queen of Spades Symphonic Suite

In 1936, the Soviet Union was a place of both intense creative fervour and suffocating political pressure. It was in this climate that Sergei Prokofiev, having recently returned to his homeland, embarked on a project to score a cinematic adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s classic novella, The Queen of Spades. Intended to mark the 1937 centenary of Pushkin’s death, the film was to be directed by Mikhail Romm. However, the project met a sudden and silent end, a victim of the tightening grip of Stalinist censorship.

While the film was abandoned, the music did not entirely vanish; instead, it began a seventy-year journey of fragmentation, recovery, and eventual rebirth as the acclaimed ballet Rushes.

The original film project was ambitious. Prokofiev had completed a detailed piano score by July 1936, which he played for Romm. The director noted that the music was neither traditionally lyrical nor dramatic but rather a repetitive structure that captured the obsession and schizophrenia of Hermann, the story’s protagonist.

However, the film was abandoned at Joseph Stalin’s insistence. Left with an unperformed score, Prokofiev reused various themes in his Fifth Symphony and Eighth Piano Sonata. For decades, the original film cues remained largely forgotten, preserved as a 14-page piano reduction in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow until choreographer Kim Brandstrup, having spotted a reference to it in a footnote, tracked it down — reportedly with the assistance of a Princeton musicologist — and found a copy held at the Prokofiev archive at Goldsmiths College, London.

The task of assembling and completing these sketches fell to the British composer and broadcaster Michael Berkeley. Berkeley, the son of composer Sir Lennox Berkeley and godson of Benjamin Britten, was uniquely suited to the task, having a long-standing passion for dance and extensive experience in contemporary composition.

Berkeley’s challenge was to transform Prokofiev’s incomplete film cues into a cohesive stage work. He crafted a distillation of the novella’s mood, focusing on the psychological intensity of Pushkin’s tale of avarice and the supernatural. While much of the material is authentically Prokofiev, Berkeley composed the necessary development sections to bridge the gaps between the original fragments. The result was a score that captured the typical side-stepping harmonies and dry humour of Prokofiev’s style.

This newly realised music was used in the Ballet Rushes - Fragments of a Lost Story, choreographed by Kim Brandstrup. The 2007 première production at the Royal Opera House featured a stellar cast of the Royal Ballet’s leading lights, including Carlos Acosta, Alina Cojocaru, Tamara Rojo, and Zenaida Yanovsky. The title itself, Rushes, alludes to the unedited raw footage of a film, a nod to the score’s original, unrealised cinematic purpose. The ballet was highly praised for conveying the essence of the story through Berkeley’s expert arrangement.

Following the success of the ballet, Berkeley updated the score into a Symphonic Suite for concert performance. This version, structured into movements including an Introduction, Adagio, and Scherzo, was recorded in 2008 by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi.

The journey of The Queen of Spades from a suppressed Soviet film project to a celebrated contemporary ballet serves as a testament to the enduring power of Prokofiev’s musical vision and Berkeley’s skill in uncovering it. Once a series of lost fragments, the score now stands as both a ballet and complete symphonic work.

The suite will finally receive its live concert premiere in London on May 30, 2026, with the Salomon Orchestra conducted by Phil Ellis.

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