Simon Morrison introduces the festival
In 1918, after completing the rigorous programme of studies at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, he departed war-torn Russia for the United States. After a two-year stay, he moved to France, where, like most émigré artists of the period, he made Paris his home. Throughout his youth, he sought to stay on the cutting edge of modernist musical fashion, and earned himself a reputation at the Conservatoire as a musical rabble-rouser, an enfant terrible. He shocked his conservative, tradition-bearing teachers by breaking the rules of traditional harmony, disregarding the norms of voice-leading, and indulging in tempestuous chromaticism. His Haydnesque ‘Classical’ Symphony of 1917 was conceived in response to the traditionalism of his teachers, who had rejected his previous symphonic efforts. Jurowski points out that Prokofiev was ‘very, very proud as a young man about having attained a very specifically individual voice as a composer’. And his talent was undeniable. He transcended the complaints of Alexander Glazunov and the ‘dreaded’ Nikolai Tcherepin to receive a prestigious prize for his First Piano Concerto of 1912. As his music became known in London, Paris and the United States, he was exoticised as a musical Bolshevik. Blanching at the comparison, he nevertheless recognised that success could not come without scandal. Plus a real Bolshevik, Lenin’s Cultural Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, had granted him permission to 6 | London Philharmonic Orchestra
© The Serge Prokofiev Archive
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) enjoyed an idyllic childhood on an estate in Sontsovka, Ukraine, where he was indulged by a doting mother. While she practised Beethoven, Chopin and Mendelssohn, Sergei was allowed to bang away on the piano in tandem. She recognised his prodigious talent, and the need to nurture it, by arranging composition lessons. Prokofiev wrote his first opera, The Giant, for home performance at the age of nine.
Sergei Prokofiev in 1918
leave the Soviet Union. As the chaos of the so-called October Revolution turned into civil war, Prokofiev headed East, making his way through Japan to the West Coast of the United States. He pledged to remain in contact with his homeland, and adopted the role of a Russian cultural representative. The reaction to his 20 November 1919 recital at the Aeolian Hall in New York confirmed what had been reported about him in advance. Having anticipated a small crowd of envious local pianists, Prokofiev was amazed to discover that his New York manager had come through for him. He was greeted by an almost full house of some 1,300 enthusiastic listeners. As the performance unfolded, the crowd pressed closer and closer to the stage to hear his scintillating rendition of the Scherzo and Finale of his 1912 Second Piano Sonata. The stiff action of the piano repeatedly flustered him, but he triumphed.
His reputation as a performer and composer for the piano was secured, but success in the larger forms was harder to come by. In 1919, he completed an opera, The Love for Three Oranges, but the première was delayed by two years and the reaction to the three performances he conducted in Chicago and New York disappointing. He looked to Europe for opportunities. The more progressive opera houses of London and Berlin beckoned, as did the illustrious Ballets Russes of Paris. By 1929, he had completed three operas and four ballet scores (if one included the little-known Trapeze of 1924), fulfilled recording contracts, and continued to perform recitals of his own music. Scores were stored in suitcases; scenarios and librettos drafted on hotel letterhead. Along the way, he married a Madrid-born, New Yorkraised singer, Lina Codina, and they had two sons. Through his wife, he became smitten with Christian Science, and began to absorb its teachings into his life as well as his art.
© The Serge Prokofiev Archive
The performance achieved the intended impression: that of a ‘neo-Scythian’, ultra-modern musician intolerant of mawkishness. Prokofiev bowed ten times during three breaks in the concert, and the next day tallied 11 reviews, most stressing his phenomenal technique, his ability to hammer ‘hell itself’ into the piano with ‘excruciating dynamics’.
Prokofiev lived a distracted, restless life, always in the moment. His music, however, suggests careful, patient thought – if not protracted labour. He might be compared to Mozart or, closer to home, Tchaikovsky, both of whom were able to imagine entire worlds of sound and commit them to paper in nearly finished form. And remarkably for a modern composer, Prokofiev’s music is just as popular. As Vladimir Jurowski, the London Philharmonic Orchestra's Principal Conductor and Festival Artistic Director observes, however, much of his oeuvre ‘remains widely unknown to the general – and even to the music-loving – audience’, despite the fact that the neglected works are ‘important and almost indispensable in understanding him as an artist’.
Prokofiev with his two sons, Svyatoslav and Oleg, in 1936
than a celebration – of Soviet industrial development. Following its stormy Parisian première, critics described it as a satire. When Diaghilev died in 1929, Prokofiev was devastated, both personally and professionally. He had lost a crucial mentor. Meantime, his latest opera, a mystical parable of real-or-imagined demonic possession called The Fiery Angel, met with a cool reception when it received its partial première in Paris, in a concert version conducted by Serge Koussevitzky in 1928. Performances were promised in several cities, but each fell through, leaving Prokofiev to lament his eight years of labour on the score.
For Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets Russes, Prokofiev composed and recomposed the ballets Chout (‘The Buffoon’, 1920), Le Pas d’acier (‘The Step of Steel’, 1926) and Le Fils prodigue (‘The Prodigal Son’, 1929). The second of these sparked a furore in Paris as well as Moscow, despite the fact that it was not even staged in the Soviet Union. In 1925, on Diaghilev’s counsel, Prokofiev teamed up with the Soviet artist Georgiy Yakulov to create a ‘Soviet’ ballet – one that he hoped would prove a hit He continued to give concerts 'Prokofiev has made an immense, priceless contribution as a pianist, and by the time he with audiences on both sides of the ideological to the musical culture of Russia. A composer of genius, was 41 had composed five piano divide in Europe. Diaghilev concertos, of which the third from he has expanded the artistic heritage left to us by the imagined that, for French 1921 ranks among the greatest great classical masters of Russian music – Glinka, critics, a ballet about Soviet in the repertoire. Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov life would be just as exotic as the fairytale and folkloric and Rachmaninoff.' Dmitri Shostakovich In the early 1930s, Prokofiev’s ballets that had earned his creative outlook changed, troupe immense fame, if not fortune. His conception of Le Pas and with it the form and content of his scores. He allowed his d’acier, however, contradicted Prokofiev’s own (Yakulov’s too) astonishing gift for melody to come to the fore, and aspired to and caused the composer no end of trouble in 1929, when he engage rather than outrage audiences. The shift began when he tried to arrange a production in Moscow. Diaghilev rearranged lived in France, but it reflected his exposure to American musical the scenes so that the ballet became a condemnation – rather trends, notably Aaron Copland’s aesthetic of ‘imposed simplicity’,
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