On May 9, 11, and 12, the Houston Symphony presents award-winning American pianist George Li in not one, but two virtuoso works for piano and orchestra. In this post, discover how the young Prokofiev flouted conventions and got the better of his professors with his Piano Concerto No. 1. Get tickets and more information here.
One day during the summer of 1911, Sergei Taneyev, the revered composer, pianist, and former director of the Moscow Conservatory, asked the young Prokofiev a question that undoubtedly puzzled many musicians of his generation: “Where, Sergei Sergeyevich, do you think your predilection for dissonances comes from?”
Prokofiev responded: “Well, you know, Sergei Ivanovich, when I was eleven years old and I brought you my first symphony [an unpublished student work], you listened to it and said with a smile, ‘Very good, very good; except the harmony is painfully primitive…’ Those words burned themselves into my brain, I became ashamed of my primitive harmony, and tried in every possible way to make it more interesting. This ambition has never left me, and as my musical powers developed I was always aiming at ever more complex harmony […]”
Laughing, Taneyev replied, “Well, imagine that! I never knew it was I who had set you off on that path…!”
A Marvelous Theme
Indeed, as a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Prokofiev frequently raised eyebrows with his daring music. Alexander Glazunov, the conservatory’s director, was outright against it. With his self-assured, cool demeanor, Prokofiev was well-aware of his own talent and paid little heed to his professors’ criticisms. He soon began to attract attention in Russian musical circles, and during the summer of 1910 he decided to compose a piano concerto to showcase his new musical style and virtuoso piano technique. Composing at the piano, he came up with the main ideas for a concerto, but during the spring of 1911 he was distracted by another idea for “a light, attractive Concertino [a shorter, simpler version of a concerto], full of joie de vivre. […] A marvelous theme for the introduction came to me immediately […]”
Other projects intervened, however, and when he at last got down to composing the concertino the following fall he realized that it was turning into a full-blown concerto. He decided to combine his ideas for the concerto and concertino, creating a compact, virtuoso showpiece in one movement: Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
The concerto begins with what Prokofiev called “A massive Introduction in D-flat major” based on the “marvelous theme” that sprang from his head—like Athena from Zeus’s—fully-formed:
Together the piano and orchestra proclaim a new era of music with a melody that combines grandeur, youthful swagger, and an irresistible catchiness. After the theme ends, the soloist plays a fast, toccata-like transitional passage lightly accompanied by the orchestra. This leads to what Prokofiev conceived of as “the main subject” of the concerto: a jaunty, tarantella-like tune introduced by the piano alone. Another virtuoso transitional passage builds to a grand pause, after which low strings and brass introduce a darker second theme, characterized by ominous drumroll-like motifs. The piano responds defiantly with more virtuoso passagework, leading to a grand return of the introduction.
The tempo then relaxes for what is effectively a mini-slow movement within the concerto; the violins introduce one of Prokofiev’s signature long, lyrical themes that combines the beautiful and the bizarre. Variations on the theme become increasingly passionate, then die away. A fast-paced development based on the tarantella-like “main subject” ensues, building to a cadenza, an extended passage for the soloist alone. The cadenza doubles as a reprise of the main tarantella theme, and varied reprises of the other main ideas follow. The concerto ends as it began with a triumphant return of the introduction.
“It is the three-fold repetition—at the beginning, in the middle and at the end—of this powerful thematic material that assures the unity of the work,” Prokofiev concluded. Not everyone agreed, though, as Prokofiev related: “Leonid Nikolayev [an influential piano teacher at the St. Petersburg Conservatory], however, says that the Concerto is not an integrated whole but a series of fragments that relate well to one another and have been skillfully stitched together. Oh, really?”
Sweet Success
The work’s enduring popularity would seem to vindicate Prokofiev’s view. The concerto’s first performances took place during the summer of 1912 in Moscow and Pavlosk (a posh suburb of St. Petersburg). “These were my first appearances with orchestra, but rather than being terrifying experiences they proved on the contrary extraordinarily agreeable,” Prokofiev confided to his diary a few days later. The audience response was so enthusiastic that he had to give two or three encores at each performance.
Perhaps his most famous performance of the concerto came in April 1914 during a legendary piano competition for the top students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Despite Glazunov’s dislike of his music, Prokofiev took advantage of a loophole in the rules of the competition and played not one, but two virtuoso pieces: Liszt’s transcription of Wagner’s Overture to Tannhäuser and his own concerto. Whatever they thought of his music, the judges agreed that he was the best pianist, and Glazunov had to grudgingly announce that Prokofiev was the winner. Prokofiev wrote, “Yes, it was indeed a triumph for me, all the sweeter for having been achieved in my beloved Conservatoire, and even more so in that it represented not the pat on the head proper to a model student, but on the contrary the striking out of a new path, my own path, which I had established in defiance of routine and the examination traditions of the Conservatoire.” —Calvin Dotsey
Don’t miss Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1 on May 9, 11, and 12! Visit houstonsymphony.org for tickets and more information.
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