Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Russian composer and pianist. Was taught piano at age 3 by his mother, who encouraged him to compose (he wrote an opera at age 9). Studied privately with Glière 1903-4. Entered St Petersburg Conservatory 1904, studying harmony and counterpoint with Lyadov, piano with A. Winkler, and orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov. Later studied piano with Anna Essipova and conducted with Tcherepnin. Composed and published several works while student, including 2 piano sonatas and first two piano concertos, all of which were condemned by the critics. Visiting Paris and London in 1914 he met Diaghilev, who commissioned a ballet from him (the war upset this plan and the mus. survives as the Scythian Suite, Ala and Lolly). In 1917 he composed his first symphony, the Classical, a superb 20th-cent. reincarnation of Haydn. After its first production in Petrograd in 1918 he left Russia for USA, appearing in NY as solo pianist in his own works. His opera Love for Three Oranges was commissioned by Chicago Opera, performed 1921. From 1920 he made his home in Paris, writing 3 ballets for Diaghilev, and having several of his works performed, conducted by Koussevitzky, another Russian exile. He completed another opera, The Fiery Angel, in 1923, but it was not staged in his lifetime. Never fully at home, Prokofiev re-visited Russia in 1927 and 1929 and returned there to live in 1933, choosing an inopportune moment when the doctrine of ‘socialist realism’ in the arts had just been propounded. He found an outlet for his particular gifts in film music—brilliant scores for Lieutenant Kijé and Alexander Nevsky—and ballet (Romeo and Juliet and, later, Cinderella), In 1941 he began work on his most ambitious opera, War and Peace, and in 1944 wrote his richest and most heroic symphony, the 5th. In spite of its success, he was among those in 1948 condemned for ‘formalism’ and was compelled to ‘confess’ his shortcomings in an open letter to the Union of Soviet Composers. He died on the same day as Stalin.

 

Though regarded as impossibly dissonant and avant-garde in his youth, Prokofiev can now be seen as in the direct line of Russian composers, embodying the bold and colourful strokes of 19th-century nationalists into a 20th-century style strongly marked by its brittle wit and capacity for pungent dramatic characterization. Like Walton and Poulenc, he was fundamentally a romantic melodist and his style is formed like theirs from a reconciliation of the two strains in his personality, the tough, astringent modernist and the lyrical traditionalist. He was successful in a wide range of works: War and Peace is a great opera on the largest scale and Love for Three Oranges and The Fiery Angel have found their way into the repertory of several opera houses, the symphonies and concertos are fine music, at least 3 of his ballets are masterpieces, the piano sonatas are crucial to the 20th-century piano repertory; and in Peter and the Wolf he created the most enduring, touching, and instructive of young persons’ guides to the orchestra.

 

 

Piano Concerto No.3 in C major, Op. 26 (1921)

Prokofiev completed the Third Concerto on holiday at St. Brevin-les-Pins in Brittany in 1921, just after the successful performances of his ballet score Chout (The fool) and The Love for Three Oranges. He gave the premiere on 16 December that year with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock. The Concerto immediately found favour, and Prokofiev used it during his first return to Russia (performing with the conductorless orchestra Persimfans on 24 January 1927) as well as for his only concerto recording, with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1933.

The ideas had been accumulating for nearly a decade - the theme of the middle movement was jotted down in 1913, two of its variations and the opening of the first movement date from 1916/18, and two of the finale's ideas are from a "white-key" quartet sketched in 1918.

In its character and structure much of the Third Concerto echoes the First. The first movement has something of the same stagy clown-routine reality - emulationg the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold, perhaps, as opposed to that of his psychological-realist rival Konstantin Stanislavsky. And there is the same initial accumulation of four apparently unrelated sections, giving way to the same ingenious blend of development and recapitulation. Yet there is also a greater degree of restraint this time, and more concern for seamless continuity, even in the early stages.

The second movement is a slow movement in a way, but devilishly fast and difficult for the piano. Its theme manages to be unmistakably a Gavotte at the same time as totally disregarding the middle-of-the-bar emphasis which is supposed to define that dance (the famous Gavotte of Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony is similarly maverick).

If in the second movement the piano has to masquerade as lover, acrobat, boxer, nocturnal poet and gymnast, in the finale he enters in a puff of smoke as charlatan-magician. There is a romantic slow central section to keep the overall tempo-scheme of the concerto in balance. And the last pages are as artfully contrived an accumulation as anything in Rachmaninov and as super-bright in their enriched C major destination as the high new-classical Stravinsky yet to come.

Program note by David Fanning

Deutsche Grammophone: Yevgeny Kissin, piano; Berliner Philharmoniker, Claudio Abbado