Composer of the Week

In Tuesday's programme, a pair of ballets and a pair of operas, both highly contrasted. The ballets are Trapeze, a concise chamber score written for a small travelling dance troupe, and Le pas d'acier - 'The Steel Step' - a 'futurist' ballet glorifying Soviet proletarian society (the Soviet authorities were reportedly not amused). The operas are the utterly absurd and perennially popular The Love for Three Oranges, and the esoteric, melodramatic and much less familiar The Fiery Angel, a remarkable work which Prokofiev himself never saw staged.