thumb|Prokofiev ca. 1918
Sergei Prokofiev set to work on his Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16, in 1912 and completed it the next year. However, that version of the concerto is lost; the score was destroyed in a fire following the Russian Revolution. Prokofiev reconstructed the work in 1923, two years after finishing his Piano Concerto No. 3, and declared it to be "so completely rewritten that it might almost be considered [Piano Concerto] No. 4." Indeed, its orchestration has features that clearly postdate the 1921 concerto. Performing as soloist, Prokofiev premiered this "No. 2" in Paris on 8 May 1924 with Serge Koussevitzky conducting. It is dedicated to the memory of Maximilian Schmidthof, a friend of Prokofiev's at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, who had committed suicide in April 1913 after having written a farewell letter to Prokofiev.
Movements and scoring
The work is scored for piano solo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, tambourine and strings.
It consists of four movements lasting some 29 to 37 minutes.
Premiere and reception
Prokofiev premiered the work originally on September 5, 1913 (August 23 on the calendar used in Russia at that time), performing the solo piano part, at Pavlovsk. Most of the audience reacted intensely. The concerto's wild temperament left a positive impression on some of the listeners, whereas others were opposed to the jarring and modernistic sound ("To hell with this futurist music!" "What is he doing, making fun of us?" "The cats on the roof make better music!").
When the original orchestral score was destroyed in a fire following the Russian Revolution, Prokofiev reconstructed and considerably revised the concerto in 1923; in the process, he made the concerto, in his own words, "less foursquare" and "slightly more complex in its contrapuntal fabric."
Analysis
The first and last movements are each around twelve minutes long and constitute some of the most dramatic music in all of Prokofiev's piano concertos. They both contain long and developed cadenzas with the first movement's cadenza alone taking up almost the entire last half of the movement.
I. Andantino—Allegretto
The first movement opens quietly with strings and clarinet playing a two-bar staccato theme which, Prokofiev biographer Daniel Jaffé suggests, "sounds almost like a ground bass passacaglia theme, that musical symbol of implacable fate". The piano takes over, constructing over a left hand accompaniment of breathing undulation a G minor narrante theme which, in the words of Soviet biographer Israel Nestyev, "suggests a quiet, serious tale in the vein of a romantic legend". This opening theme contains a second idea, a rising scalic theme; as Robert Layton observes, when it is later taken up by unison strings as "a broad singing melody, one feels that the example of Rachmaninov has not gone altogether unheeded". The recapitulation section is in effect carried entirely by the soloist's notoriously taxing five-minute cadenza, one of the longer and more difficult cadenze in the classical piano repertoire, taking the listener all the way to the movement's climax. Noted in two staves, the piano plays a reprise of its own opening theme. A third staff, which requires the pianist to perform large jumps with both hands frequently, contains the motif from the earlier orchestral accompaniment.
The accumulated charge is eventually released in a premature climax (G minor), marked and colossale, which consists of oscillating triplet semiquaver runs across the upper four octaves of the piano, kept in rhythm by a leaping left-hand crotchet accompaniment. Prokofiev himself describes this as one of the hardest places in the concerto.
:<score sound="1">
\new GrandStaff <<
\new Staff \relative c' {
\set Score.tempoHideNote = ##t
\tempo 4 = 108
fis'32 gis a b \ottava #1
cis d e fis
gis a b c d e fis gis
a-> fis d a \ottava #0
fis d a d
fis eis, fis gis a b cis d
}
\new Staff \relative c' {
\slashedGrace <fis fis'>8 <fis a d fis>2 \ottava #1
a4 \ottava #0
fis,
}
\new Staff \relative {
\clef bass
<e,, e'>16-. fis'-. a-. d32\( fis
d16-.\) fis-.
\clef treble
d'32\( e fis gis
a16->\) d-. a-. gis-.
fis-> d-. a-. f-.
}
>></score>
The last bars before the absolute climax are marked tumultuoso and reach supreme discord as C sharp minor collides with D minor.
As both hands move apart, to embrace the piano in D minor, an accent on every note, the orchestra announces its return, strings and timpani swelling furiously from to . The listener is exposed to the apocalyptic blare of several horns, trombones, trumpets and tuba, which, as Jaffé describes it, "balefully [play] the opening 'fate' theme fortissimo", this received more acclaim when reissued in 2009.
The recording by Yundi Li with Ozawa and the Berlin Philharmonic in 2007 is widely praised:
The New York Times recommended and regarded it as year‘s most notable,
while it is listed in The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 3 Stars.
More recently the Grammy-winning recording by Kissin, with Ashkenazy now conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra, has received praise, as has that by Wang and Dudamel.
In 2016 Beatrice Rana's recording with the Orchestra of L'Accademia di Santa Cecilia di Roma conducted by Antonio Pappano, received Gramophone Magazine's Editor's Choice, and BBC Magazine's Record of the Month.
The concerto's scherzo provides the musical score for Swiss animator Georges Schwizgebel's animated short, Jeu.
Notes
References
External links
- The Prokofiev Page (including Catalog of Prokofiev works)
- Online version of Liner Notes from Recording on Naxos
- , Yuja Wang, Berlin Philharmonic, Paavo Järvi, 2015