The plant is suitable he says as it is easier to grow and harvest and simple to insert genes into

The plant is suitable, he says, as it is easier to grow and harvest, and simple to insert genes into.Congressional backing for the research has been led by right-wing senator Jesse Helms and Congressman Robin Hayes – both Republicans representing North Carolina.Cynics speculate that it may be designed to encourage the State’s hard-pressed tobacco farmers in an election year.But Clive Bates, Director of Action on Smoking and Health, said yesterday: “This kind of thing is the way ahead for tobacco and the people who farm it. We have not got anything against the plant itself, just the way it is used. If they can find something better to do with it than turning it into coffin nails that has to be a good thing.”. The premiÿre of the opera was a momentous event in my life,” pianist Sviatoslav Richter recalled. “That evening, when I first heard Semyon Kotko, I understood that Prokofiev was a great composer.” Richter was not one to give his praise lightly, and knew a thing or two about operatic repertoire, having once hoped to become an opera conductor.

Many Russians since have agreed with Richter, not least Valery Gergiev who, on 28 June, will conduct Kirov Opera through the British premiÿre of Semyon Kotko at Covent Garden. The premiÿre of the opera was a momentous event in my life,” pianist Sviatoslav Richter recalled. “That evening, when I first heard Semyon Kotko, I understood that Prokofiev was a great composer.” Richter was not one to give his praise lightly, and knew a thing or two about operatic repertoire, having once hoped to become an opera conductor. Many Russians since have agreed with Richter, not least Valery Gergiev who, on 28 June, will conduct Kirov Opera through the British premiÿre of Semyon Kotko at Covent Garden.
When Prokofiev wrote Semyon Kotko in the summer of 1939 he was at the height of his considerable powers as a composer: since returning to the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, he had already composed his ballet Romeo and Juliet, his “musical tale” Peter and the Wolf and film scores for Lieutenant Kijé and Alexander Nevsky; previously in the West he had composed several operas, including Love for Three Oranges, not to mention dozens of masterpieces in the form of piano concertos, symphonies and ballets. But the circumstances of Semyon Kotko’s composition were different from all these other works. Not only was it Prokofiev’s first Soviet opera, but it was also written in a deliberate attempt to rescue a very dear friend in need; this was the internationally acclaimed theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, vilified at home for failing to conform to the demands of Socialist Realism.The two first met in 1917, when Meyerhold directed Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler. This deliberately confounded operatic conventions with fluid, almost cinematic action, avoiding “stand-and-deliver” arias in preference to a style of musical declamation which more faithfully mirrored the way people spoke in everyday life.

Meyerhold, a bold experimenter in anti-realist theatre, was deeply attracted to Prokofiev’s opera. When the February Revolution scuppered that production, the two attempted to collaborate on other operatic projects over the next 20 years, but to no avail.The conditions for collaboration became more parlous with Stalin’s rise to power. Following the banning of proletarian arts organisations and the introduction of the Central Union of Musicians early in 1932, Stalin then imposed the official aesthetic of Socialist Realism. Soviet art, he stipulated, was not only to be relevant to the everyday life of the Soviet people, but was also to “point out what is leading it towards socialism”. Artistic experimentation was frowned upon, and an “ultra-realistic” style – typified by vast murals of smiling, wholesome peasants striding across fields of golden wheat – was prescribed in the visual arts while novels concerned themselves with the joys of rural collectivisation and industrialisation. It was rather less obvious, though, how Socialist Realism might be applied to music.Then in 1936, a leading article in Pravda attacked Shostakovich’s internationally acclaimed opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, condemning both its advanced musical style and its celebration of its amoral heroine’s sexuality. Meyerhold, himself under attack for his anti-realist style of theatre, was one of the very few who dared to speak in Shostakovich’s defence, affirming his right, and that of all artists, to experiment.

In that very year Prokofiev, with unwittingly bad timing, left Paris to settle in Moscow.Wooed by Soviet cultural officials, Prokofiev had drawn closer to Russia not only in the fond hope of creating a “new simplicity” for the Soviet people, but of injecting new life into Russian opera. But the shockwaves caused by Pravda’s denunciation of Lady Macbeth meant that culture officials became extremely cautious: one major project of Prokofiev’s after another failed to reach performance. Even his Romeo and Juliet, completed in the summer of 1935, achieved only one, low-key production in Czechoslovakia despite Prokofiev’s efforts to secure a staging in Russia throughout the late 1930s. Then in May 1938, the film director Eisenstein – himself accused of formalistic experimentation and badly in need of an official success – asked Prokofiev to score his first sound film, Alexander Nevsky. Its thinly veiled anti-Nazi plot concerns a medieval Russian prince (canonised by Stalin’s hero, Ivan the Terrible) who defeats invading Teutonic Knights in a decisive battle on the frozen Lake Chud. Stalin loved it, and Prokofiev rapidly capitalised on the film’s success by arranging from it a highly successful cantata for massed choir and orchestra. And his thoughts turned to Meyerhold.In 1938 Meyerhold’s theatre had been liquidated.

Meyerhold’s former teacher Stanislavsky unexpectedly rescued him by offering work as his assistant at his Opera Theatre. Prokofiev now offered Meyerhold his next opera even without a contract. The libretto was taken from Katayev’s novel I Am a Son of the Working People. Set during the First World War, the story concerns a young Ukrainian peasant, Semyon Kotko, who returns home having been demobbed from the Russian army by the October Revolution. The father of his sweetheart Sofya, Tkachenko, is a “kulak”, a “capitalist” peasant who farms his own holdings. Inevitably, with the Bolsheviks wiping out the kulaks to make way for rural collectivisation, Tkachenko is portrayed as a reactionary who wants to have nothing to do with Semyon. He readily collaborates with the invading German army, betrays fellow villagers and almost forces his daughter into marrying the son of a former landowning family before she is rescued by Semyon and local partisans.