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Posted on 10/14/2001 7:43:02 AM PDT by dighton

PETER and the Wolf, the children's classic, may have survived more than 50 years of Soviet censorship but it has failed to escape the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's knife.

Orchestra leaders have been accused of venturing where even Stalin didn't tread by cutting a number of scenes they deemed politically incorrect.

Almost half of the 30-minute work by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev has been axed for a production due to be staged at Henry Wood Hall, the orchestra's Glasgow headquarters, later this month.

The piece, written for an orchestra with a narrator, has been a children's classic since it was written in 1936.

Previous recordings have featured David Bowie, Jack Lemmon, Dame Edna Everage and Sting. In 1996, it was made into a film starring Kirstie Alley.

However, the RSNO's education officer, Paul Rissmann, has decided that the description of a duck being swallowed whole by a wolf is too violent for young children. He has also removed a scene which featured an orchestral rendition of gunfire because he believed that, too, was inappropriate.

The changes have incensed fans of the composer, who have accused the orchestra of being oversensitive.

"I don't know why they did it - the duck doesn't die, but stays alive inside the wolf," said Noelle Mann, curator of the Prokofiev Archive at Goldsmiths in London and secretary of the Prokofiev Association.

"Prokofiev had an acerbic sense of humour, which he shared with most Russians. It was written in a different era, when there weren't the worries and niceties that we have now."

Prokofiev left Russia after the revolution erupted in 1917, travelling in America, Japan, and France. In 1929 he was denounced as an "enemy of Soviet culture" because of his popularity in the West.

However, he missed his homeland and returned in 1932, where he battled censorship until his death on March 5, 1953 - the same day as Stalin.

His opera, Semyon Kotko, featured Germans as villains. When Stalin signed his non-aggression pact with the Nazis in 1939, it was removed from the Soviet Union's official repertoire and not politically rehabilitated until 1970.

Mann claims that his work has now become the victim of "politically correct ideas".

"This is something Stalin and the [Soviet] art committees did to music at the time," she said. "Prokofiev would not have approved. Children have grown up with this for years and enjoyed it and there doesn't seem any reason to change it."

Prokofiev, one of Russia's most revered composers, wrote the piece in four days after being commissioned by the Central Children's Theatre to write a musical symphony for children.

The work, to be performed as part of the RSNO's Monster Music season, is the story of Peter and his encounter with a ravenous wolf, a duck, a bird and a band of gun-wielding hunters, and has become a staple of childhood entertainment.

In the original, the narrator says: "The duck waddled as fast as she could but the wolf was much faster. The wolf came closer and closer and finally 'gulp!' The wolf swallowed the duck whole."

In the RSNO's version, the wolf does not hunt and then eat the heroic duck. Instead, it bites the duck on the foot and the duck escapes. This leads in turn to another change - the audible quacking of the duck inside the wolf's belly has had to be removed from the piece's climax. The hunters, represented in the original version by an orchestral rendition of gun fire, are also changed - the guns are absent.

Simon Crookall, chief executive of the RSNO, defended the changes."I think it is quite inspired. We had to abbreviate the story - it's far too long."

Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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