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He rivals Dimitri Shostakovich<\/a><\/strong> as the most important Russian composer of the 20th century. Yet Sergey Prokofiev didn’t always seem typical composer fare.<\/p> While on his final tour of the US in 1938, Prokofiev gave an interview to the New York Times<\/em>. The reporter described his \u2018cool and pleasantly untemperamental manner of address\u2019, which \u2018bespoke the industrial executive rather than the creator of music\u2019. Indeed, his appearance \u2013 balding and far from handsome, perfumed and decked out in suits \u2013 was scarcely that of a conventional composer, nor one who had chosen two years earlier to settle in Stalin\u2019s Russia.<\/p> By then Prokofiev had already composed several works for Soviet audiences, some of which remain his most widely known: the film soundtrack Lieutenant Kij\u00e9<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, the ballet Romeo and Juliet<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, and the ‘symphonic tale for children’, Peter and the Wolf<\/em>. Yet there\u2019s a lot more to Prokofiev than these wholesomely democratic works. <\/p>