PROKOFIEV

If you want to learn to orchestrate, listen to Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf a hundred times. But what if you can’t write a modern melody? No need to worry. Prokofiev can help with that too. How Prokofiev wrote those melodies through two World Wars, the Great Depression, and Stalinist persecution I’ll never know. The man was a bulwark of melodic sanity in a generation of tonal lunacy.