Prokofiev & Tchaikovsky 5
PROGRAMME NOTES
Sergei Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26 (1921)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 (1888)
[all programme notes]
[discover also: Curated by... Nikolay Lugansky]
[read also: Lugansky's personal notes]
[read also: longread Scriabin]
[read also: Rachmaninov in the picture]
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19.12.2024 DE BIJLOKE GENT
20.12.2024 FLAGEY BRUSSEL
"in the Third Concerto the orchestra lives its incredibly multicolored life and there is full parity with the piano. This is one of Prokofiev's most perfect works, in which inspiration, technique and expression are in perfect balance. It's the most joyful piano concerto that I know." (Nikolay Lugansky)
Third Piano Concerto
For pianist Nikolai Lugansky, Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto is not only one of the most joyful piano concertos he knows, but also ‘one of his most perfect works, in which inspiration, technique and expression are in perfect balance.’ However, after the concerto’s première on 16 December 1921 in Chicago and the next performance in New York, opinions were. While the Chicago Daily Herald applauded the work as ‘the most beautiful modern concerto for piano’, the New York audience booed the composition. No wonder that Prokofiev left the United States for good in 1922.
Back in 1917, however, Prokofiev had left for the United States full of optimism, keen to give his career as a pianist and composer fresh impetus. A piano concerto was the ideal calling card for the purpose, and so Prokofiev began working on his Third Piano Concerto in the summer of 1921. He drew on some earlier sketches for the work, including a few thematic ideas that he had written down in 1911. He also reused a theme and variations dating from 1913, along with two themes that he had gathered in 1918 for use in a string quartet. He finished the cut-and-paste work during a trip to the Breton coast. One of his neighbours there was the Russian poet Konstantin Balmont. When Prokofiev played him a fragment of his concerto, he responded promptly with a few verses, as a result of which Prokofiev dedicated his concerto to Balmont.
Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto is the only one of his five piano concertos that follows the traditional tripartite form. Although it is one of the most virtuoso concertos for piano, it is not a typical bravura piece. Fast, virtuoso passages in a driving rhythm alternating with lyrical melodies that resemble his later renowned ballet Romeo and Juliet. And despite the criticism that the original was subjected to, the concerto has become one of Prokofiev’s most beloved and widely played works.
written by Aurélie Walschaert
Fifth Symphony
Tchaikovsky’s deeply felt nationalist sentiments bound him closely to his contemporaries in the twilight of Czarist Russia. Yet—ironically—his musical expression of the “national element” placed him at the center of a bitter debate. While the central European musical world in the late 19th century argued over the relative merits of Wagner and Brahms, Russian musical society was marked by hostility between a progressive group of nationalists, the “Mighty Handful,” and conservatives such as Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein, who wanted Russian music to reflect European techniques and standards.
Though he drew inspiration from Russia’s rich vein of folk music, Tchaikovsky embraced his European training and rejected the attitudes of the nationalists as simplistic: “The young Petersburg composers are very gifted but they are all impregnated with the most horrible presumptuousness and a purely amateur conviction of their superiority over all other musicians in the universe,” he once grumbled. But shortly after the premiere of his Fifth Symphony in November 1888, he wrote to his brother: “On Saturday I took part in a Russian Symphony concert. I am very glad that I could prove, in public, that I do not belong to any particular party.”
Tchaikovsky was sensitive to the public dimension; as the country’s foremost composer and as a conductor with an international reputation, he was closely scrutinized. In an 1882 letter to a Russian critic, he argued: “It is not important that European audiences applauded me but that all Russian music and Russian art were received with enthusiasm in my person. The Russians ought to know that a Russian musician has held the banner of our art high in the big European centers.”
Composed shortly after a long European tour, the Fifth Symphony is typical of the artistic balance Tchaikovsky struck; it is not explicitly nationalistic, but a distinctively Russian flavor pervades many of the themes.
There is also a related, but deeper, artistic issue in the work. As musicologist Leon Plantinga points out, Tchaikovsky’s personal approach often conflicted with the strictures of his formal training: “He struggled ceaselessly with the opposed demands of formal traditions he had learned in the conservatory and his own predilection for an emotional and expressive progression of events corresponding to an unspoken program.”
The idea of an “unspoken program” was certainly in the composer’s mind as he sat down to compose this symphony; in the spring of 1888 he noted a possible approach:
“Intr[oduction]. Complete resignation before Fate—or, what is the same thing, the inscrutable designs of Providence.”
Although he eventually dropped the specific programmatic references, the symphony projects some kind of dramatic significance. The broad outlines are made clear by a recurring idea that has become known as the “fate” motif; its original ominous character undergoes various metamorphoses, emerging triumphant in the score’s concluding pages.