The Tale of the Stone Flower (Prokofiev) The Tale of the Stone Flower (Prokofiev) The Tale of the Stone Flower, Op. 118 (), is Sergei Prokofiev's eighth and last ballet, written between 1948 and 1953. It is based on the Russian Ural folk tale "The Stone Flower" by Pavel Bazhov and is also the last of the trilogy of ballets Prokofiev wrote in the Russian ballet tradition. It was premiered posthumously in 1954, conducted by Yuri Fayer. The work is scored for an orchestra consisting of 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (2nd doubling cor anglais), 2 clarinets (1st doubling E-flat clarinet, 2nd doubling bass clarinet),
Sergei Prokofiev concert tour in the Soviet Union. Over the course of more than two months, he spent time in Moscow and Leningrad (as St Petersburg had been renamed), where he enjoyed a very successful staging of "The Love for Three Oranges" in the Mariinsky Theatre. In 1928, Prokofiev completed his Third Symphony, which was broadly based on his unperformed opera "The Fiery Angel". The conductor Serge Koussevitzky characterized the Third as "the greatest symphony since Tchaikovsky's Sixth." In the meantime, however, Prokofiev, under the influence of the teachings of Christian Science, had turned against the expressionist style and the subject matter