PROKOFIEV
SERGEI PROKOFIEV
(1891–1953)
London Philharmonic Orchestra – Sinfonia Concertante for Cello and Orchestra in E minor, op 125
Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1997
Sergei Prokofiev was one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century, a child prodigy who was said to be making music before he could write. He studied at the St Petersburg Conservatory where his teachers included Rimsky-Korsakov, and his first piano concerto (of five) won the Rubinstein Prize. The Sicilian Suite of 1916 with its harsh, hammering rhythms and relentless dissonance, established him as a major progressive while the Classical Symphony the following year demonstrated his talent for pastiche. This was a paradox which persisted throughout his life and work. As a man he could be aloof and sardonic, but his music contains moments of beautiful lyricism and even wit. When he left his homeland in the wake of the Russian Revolution, he was regarded in the west as a stalwart of the Russian tradition, but on his return to Moscow in 1936 he was considered to be westernised and decadent, so much so that he was among the leading Soviet composers to be censured in 1948 for showing “formalistic perversions and anti-democratic tendencies” in his music.
It was Stalin’s call for ‘Socialist Realism’ art that was in part responsible for a gradual mellowing of Prokofiev’s tone over the final fifteen years of his life. Socialist Realism itself was a woolly concept whose main idea was that art, in order to be relevant for the masses, needed to be vigorous, optimistic and above all accessible. Ironically, in practice this ‘progressive’ aesthetic more often than not meant the reproduction of comfortable and familiar sounds and sonorities that looked back to the safe models of the past, rather than forward to the possibility of new ideas. In order to be heard, therefore, composers were tempted to play safe and censor themselves while they wrote so as to avoid any potentially contentious modernity. For Prokofiev this was a particularly painful dilemma: his music, he said, had always “striven for clarity and melodiousness. But at the same time, I have not tried to get by on hackneyed melody and outmoded harmonies. This is what makes it so difficult to compose clear music – the clarity must be new not old.”
Her certainly made a show of conforming. Following Shostakovich’s brush with the authorities over the relentlessly dissonant modernism of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936, Prokofiev contented himself for a while with easy, accessible works, including several pieces for children among which Peter and the Wolf was a transparently obvious attempt to show that he was as capable as anybody of providing music with an educative or didactic purpose. In 1939 he even wrote a cantata, Hail to Stalin, which was deemed sufficiently grovelling to merit a public broadcast in the street – but the composer himself would not even allow his own family to discuss the work.
The extent to which he succeeded in convincing the authorities of his bona fides is indicated by the fact that in 1951 he was awarded the Stalin Prize, but it had been a long time coming. The Sinfonia Concertante dates from this period, though its origins stretch back to his years in Paris in the early thirties. At that time he had produced the first sketches for a cello concerto, op 58, commissioned by Gregor Piatigorsky. Although Prokofiev had professed contempt for the existing repertoire of the instrument, his own concerto, completed in 1938, was premiered at Moscow on 26 November, and was coolly received. In typically blunt terms, the composer refused to change a note, but later two factors combined to soften this resistance: one was his lifelong propensity to revise ‘finished’ works, and the other was his admiration for the playing of Mstislav Rostropovich.
In 1947 the then 20-year-old cellist resurrected this 1st Cello Concerto, and two years later he and Prokofiev collaborated on the Cello Sonata and other pieces for the instrument which were left unfinished at the time of the composer’s death. They worked together on the new version of the 1st Cello Concerto before finally arriving, after further revisions, at the title Sinfonia Concertante for Cello and Orchestra, op 125.
It is at once a forceful and appealing work, giving, as its title suggests, equal weight to both orchestra and soloist. It demonstrates Prokofiev’s unique individuality as a composer in its bold rhythmic variations, its deceptive lightness, and the lyricism which characterised his most popular works, like Romeo and Juliet and the 3rd Piano Concerto. There is much contrast between the three movements, particularly in the yoking together of stabbing rhythms with clear, melodic lines, and in many ways it is one of Prokofiev’s most distinctive productions, showing the old and the new to equally memorable effect. Rostropovich himself took care to ensure there was ample opportunity for virtuoso display, particularly in the second and third movements with their ferociously taxing cadenza passages, and he it was who premiered the work on 18 February 1952 with the Moscow Youth Orchestra under Sviatoslav Richter.
Critics were quick to point out the old Prokofiev in the “harshness of timbre and deliberately disjointed character of certain passages” while acknowledging the beauty of the bold, singing themes of the piece. Yet it seems the musical establishment had still not wholeheartedly welcomed their most prodigal son back into the fold. His 7th Symphony, also premiered that year, was to be Prokofiev’s last major orchestral work. At approximately nine pm on 5 March 1953, he died of a massive brain haemorrhage, anticipating, in a sweet dramatic irony, the death of Joseph Stalin by barely three quarters of an hour.
