It’s possible Sergei Prokofiev wrote his Symphony No. 7 to appease Russia’s cultural police. They had banned his Symphony No. 6, for its “decadent formalism” and its “threat to the Soviet people”.

The 7th, on the other hand, has been described as “childlike”; certainly there is plenty of music for dance and play. (Well, after all, it was commissioned by the Children’s Division of State Radio.) Indeed, it could be described as programmatic, or even filmic, such are the myriad moods, all the way down to melancholy.

It even ends on a note of melancholy, which the conductor for the premiere performance in 1952 suggested Prokofiev re-write to make it more upbeat. He even dangled the carrot of a possible Stalin prize of 100,000 rebels. Prokofiev did not win it and asked his friend Mstislav Rostropovich to “take care that this new ending never exists after me”. Today’s performance honoured that request.

Conductor, Eduardo Strausser (above), led a very large QSO on a merry romp through Prokofiev’s interesting, and mostly pleasant light-hearted 4-movement work (program here).

In particular, the second movement is to the waltz time signature, but swirling around the ballroom music it...