RACHMANINOFF & PROKOFIEV
Notes on the composers and the pieces
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Piano Concerto No.3
Sergei Prokofiev
Symphony No. 5
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Sergei Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat Major, Op. 100
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) was born in what is now Sontsivka, Ukraine, to an agronomist father and a pianist mother who exerted a strong musical influence on him. He wrote his first piece at age five and first opera at nine when he was able to play Beethoven sonatas. At eleven, he began harmony and orchestration study with Reinhold Glière. Two years later he enrolled at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied composition with Anatoly Lyadov, piano with Anna Yesipova, and conducting with Nikolai Tcherepnin. After poring over scores of Alexander Glazunov and Alexander Scriabin, he wrote a symphony that he described to composer Nicolai Miaskovsky as running “for twenty…thirty minutes…crossing out…anything that seems…pompous.” Its 1908 premiere was a failure, and the score was lost. That same year Prokofiev’s performances of his modernistic and stormy piano works earned him the label of enfant terrible. By 1913 he was an established composer and pianist whose completion of two piano concertos helped fortify his reputation, especially among modernists.
After graduating with the Rubinstein Prize for best student pianist, Prokofiev traveled to London in 1913. There he met Ballets Russes director Sergei Diaghilev who asked him to compose music for a ballet based on the Scythians.1 Prokofiev responded with Ala and Lolli, but Diaghilev rejected it as not Russian enough, so the composer turned it into an orchestral work, Scythian Suite (1915). A second Diaghilev commission, the brutal ballet Chout (1915), fared better, though revisions delayed its premiere until 1921.
In 1916 Prokofiev returned to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where, as an organ student, he obtained a deferment from military service. The Mariinsky Theater commissioned his opera The Gambler in 1916, but rehearsal problems and the February Revolution cancelled performances until 1927. In 1917, he completed his cheeky Violin Concerto No. 1, the primeval cantata Seven, They Are Seven (rev. 1933), Classical Symphony (aka Symphony No. 1), and two major piano works.
In 1918 Prokofiev moved to the United States as part of a Russian Revolution-induced brain drain. There he toured as a pianist and accepted a Chicago Opera commission to compose The Love for Three Oranges. Negative reviews drove him to Paris, where he resumed his association with Diaghilev, only to learn that his European popularity as a composer had waned, forcing him to concertize as a pianist and conductor in the Soviet Union and the United States. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1936 where he revised the ballet Romeo and Juliet in 1940 and composed the ballet Cinderella in 1944. He also wrote film scores for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938, later turned into a cantata) and Ivan the Terrible (1945).
Like several Soviet composers, Prokofiev was charged with “formalism” in 19482. That same year his first wife, Carolina Codina Nemísskaia (aka Lina), was sent to a penal colony for trying to send money to her mother in Spain. She was released in 1956, left the Soviet Union in 1974, and died in London in 1989. Her imprisonment left Prokofiev free to get a divorce and marry poet Mira Mendelson in 1948.
Prokofiev was a good writer. Worth reading are his Diaries that cover his life from 1907 to 1933 as well as Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings, which covers a concert tour of the Soviet Union. The Diary includes five short stores (not all completed) plus an autobiography. An avid chess player, Prokofiev was a friend of world champions Jose Capablanca and Mikhail Botvinnik. He played against both and beat Capablanca once in a simultaneous match.3
Prokofiev’s music is Russian in style, often laced with a touch of French influence (a common mix in pre-Soviet Russia, many of whose artists admired their French counterparts). It is overt, colorful, lively, often quirky and sardonic, and often full of piquant modulations and intervals. At heart he was a composer of operas, ballets, and solo piano music, but he also wrote seven symphonies, five concertos for piano, two for violin, and three concerto-like works with cello.
When Prokofiev composed Symphony No. 5 in 1944, World War II was raging; the Soviet Union arranged for Dmitri Shostakovich, Nikolai Miaskovsky, Aram Khachaturian, and Prokofiev to live far from battlefields so they could compose in peace. Prokofiev called his Fifth Symphony “very important not only for the musical material that went into it but because I was returning to the symphonic form after a break of 16 years. The Fifth Symphony is the culmination of an entire period in my work. I conceived of it as a symphony on the greatness of the human soul.”
The Fifth was premiered in Moscow in 1945 with the composer conducting; the American premiere that same year was played by the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky. Soon after the Moscow performance the composer fell and suffered a concussion with sequelae that plagued him the rest of his life, but he never stopped composing. Post-concussion works include Symphonies 6, 7, and a revision of No. 4.
Symphony No. 5 is in four movements.
The first movement, Andante, begins with a slow introduction that is urbane, powerful, and somewhat wry. It at first sounds like an awakening, then like a gathering of resources. A flute solo sets the orchestra to gathering strength and energy until things quiet down. The strings take up the flute solo while the orchestra pokes about before returning to the earlier material. Things turn serious with sarcasm and increasing power as melodic lines in the upper strings mix with those in the lower strings. The movement ends with an explosion that includes a powerful phrase from earlier measures.
The busy sardonicism of the second movement, Allegro marcato, lends it the character of a scherzo. After a sly theme in the woodwinds over urbane horns, it focuses on the middle strings who play under high-register, breathy violins like a chugging motor or a bustling factory. Later, a mocking march with muted trumpets in their low range snarls over clocklike accompaniment like a mocking puppet show. The movement ends in a wild, emphatic rush.
The third movement, Adagio, is partly a somber processional in triple time, at times ticking like a triple-time clock. Next a slowly rising undulating melody rises from deep in the strings and gives way to a slow, dotted triple-rhythm march. An angular theme sounds in the low trumpet, the dotted rhythm and angular melody return as if in competition. Textures in the horns are followed by silence. The wandering theme reappears in the high strings, spiced by sly harmony. A second section builds from the bottom up with deliberate pacing spiced by low muted trumpets and ends quietly.
The final movement, Allegro giocoso, is upbeat and benign. The slow introduction recalls the first movement then turns breezy with a clarinet theme darting over horns. Employing remnants of Romeo and Juliet may seem odd in wildly energetic, often snarky music, but it works, as does an ending that suggests a train pulling into a station.
—Roger Hecht
Roger Hecht plays trombone in the Mercury Orchestra. He is a former member of Bay Colony Brass (where he was also the Operations/Personnel Manager), the Syracuse Symphony, Lake George Opera, New Bedford Symphony, and Cape Ann Symphony, as well as trombonist and orchestra manager of Lowell House Opera, Commonwealth Opera, and MetroWest Opera. He is a regular reviewer for American Record Guide, contributed to Classical Music: Listener’s Companion, and has written articles on music for the Elgar Society Journal and Positive Feedback magazine. His fiction collection, The Audition and Other Stories, includes a novella about a trombonist preparing for and taking a major orchestra audition (English Hill Press, 2013).
1The Scythians were equestrian nomads of Iranic origin who migrated from Central Asia to modern day Ukraine and southern Russia.
2Formalism was a term used by the Soviets to define a work of art that was deemed too elitist, difficult, or complex to appeal to the working class.
3In a simultaneous match, one strong player, usually a Grandmaster, plays games against several opponents at the same time. The Grandmaster goes from opponent to opponent, making one move at each stop. Usually, the Grandmaster wins. Some Grandmasters play these games blindfolded.
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