Lincoln Center Great Performers Presents

Russian Dreams: The Music of Sergei Prokofiev

Monday, March 23, 2009 at 8:00

Avery Fisher Hall

London Symphony Orchestra

Valery Gergiev, conductor

Vladimir Feltsman, piano

All-Prokofiev program

Symphony No. 1 in D major, Op. 25 (“Classical”)

Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16 

Symphony No. 6 in E-flat minor, Op. 111

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 8:00

Avery Fisher Hall

Pre-concert lecture, A Tale of Three Cities: Petrograd, Paris, Moscow, by Harlow Robinson at 6:45, Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse

London Symphony Orchestra

Valery Gergiev, conductor

Vadim Repin, violin

All-Prokofiev program

Symphony No. 2 in D minor, Op. 40

Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 19

Symphony No. 7 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131

Now that Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra have completed the first half of their traversal of Prokofiev's symphonies and a selection of his concerti for piano and violin, one can catch one's breath, assimilate some of the rarely-heard music that has been played, and ponder this exciting new partnership of orchestra and conductor. It is, after all, Gergiev's first tour with the LSO as principle conductor, and, since Prokofiev, ever versatile, explored so many different strategies of structure, texture, and orchestration, these concerts are a remarkable opportunity to become familiar with Gergiev's way with the London musicians. Not that "familiar" is quite an appropriate word: Mr. Gergiev has a unique gift for surprising his audiences—for making them gasp in admiration at some unexpected turn or gesture. His concerts are always an adventure.

Prokofiev's symphonies are no less of an adventure. Like Brahms, he broached fundamentally different forms,  techniques, and states of mind in each symphony. What's more, as I discussed in my account of the Bard Music Festival, some of Prokofiev's most original and important work is the least known today. This stems from the circumstance that his career spanned pre-Soviet Russia, the United States in the early twenties, then Paris, and finally Stalin's Soviet Union; and he encountered opposition and disappointment in each. The Revolution brought about the cancellation of the premiere of his First Symphony in 1917 (as well as that of his First Violin Concerto, which was on the second program). Eventually the symphony, as one of Prokofiev's most accessible works, became one of his most popular, notably in America. (The American Prokofiev and the Russian Prokofiev do not by any means overlap more than here and there.) In the Second Symphony (1924-5), with which he intended to make a splash in Paris, he abandoned the classicism, brevity, and accessibility of the first in favor of an unconventional two-movement structure (a sonata form followed by variations), massive dissonant chords, and dense textures. Poor orchestral playing, the acoustics of the Paris Opera, and perhaps a certain forced excess of ambition ensured that the symphony received a mixed, mostly unenthusiastic response, and it has never found a place in the repertory. At the end of his life Prokofiev planned to revise it, but he didn't live to finish the job.

Of his remaining symphonies only the Fifth, with its sprawling panorama of the USSR in wartime, is played with any regularity; yet, they are all compelling. In the third and the fourth he recycled music from stage works: his opera, The Fiery Angel, which was never performed in his lifetime, and the ballet, The Prodigal Son, respectively. Koussevitzky had commissioned the Fourth for the 50th anniversary of the BSO in 1930. Its premiere was not a great success. Prokofiev wrote the last three symphonies for Soviet taste, if the political machinations of the Stalinist cultural committees can be called taste. He was most comfortable with their requirements (above all popular accessibility and a triumphant, demotic finale) in the Fifth, in which they led him back to an enriched classicism. The Sixth and the Seventh, however, are darker. In the finale of the Sixth, a brooding, allusive work, Prokofiev wrests the conventional major chord at the very last minute from passages expressing wild despair, and the Seventh ends in the elegiac mood of its first movement. Prokofiev heeded advice that was offered him and revised the ending with a jaunty tune from another part of the work. This, fortunately, is rarely performed.

Gergiev's approach to Prokofiev is hardly unfamiliar to western audiences, since, he and the LSO produced a boxed set of live performances for Philips in 2005. In these concerts, however, he manages to keep his sense of discovery and the freshness of the orchestra's playing as alive as ever. Both Gergiev and the LSO, moreover, and no strangers to Avery Fisher Hall, and they negotiated its acoustics brilliantly. In massive tutti, there was both depth and coherence in their attacks and their balances, not so much from any imposed external discipline as from the musicians' engagement in the music, as it follows its harmonic argument and mood shifts. The mass and bite of the attacks in the full orchestra or in the strings or brass were hair-raising in themselves and always in the right place. Gergiev produced a stunning effect with Prokofiev's Luftpausen. His baton-less technique seems more focussed on expression and color, but his sense of structure and shape is unerring. Provided one accepts his general view of these works—and I have no trouble with that—there is not much to object to in these thrilling performances.  In the First or the Fifth (which we haven't heard yet) there are musicians who take a more classical approach, with tidier execution and more refined textures, as if Prokofiev were more of an emulator of Stravinsky than he actually was. The playing of the LSO was not as refined as it is under Haitink or Davis, but they are still the same world-class orchestra. The blazing dissonances in the winds and the anthracite grittiness of the lower strings and brass could not be more eloquent in expressing Prokofiev's pain-laden rhetoric. Gergiev creates a feeling of spontaneity and an intensity we associate with Furtwängler or early Walter, but it is built on solid ground. His work with the LSO in this uncompromising approach to this often difficult and extremely varied music confirms him as one of our great conductors. I also admire his predecessor, Sir Colin Davis, as one the greats of his generation. The clean ensemble and color he elicits from the LSO and the lucidity he brings to Mozart, Berlioz, and Sibelius alike make it easy for some to underestimate for its lack of pretension, but I have never been tempted to do so. Gergiev brings a significant change, but, I believe, it will be good for the LSO.

The first two concerts included Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto and his First Violin Concerto and with them two exceptional soloists, the pianist Vladimir Feltsman and violinist Vadim Repin. Neither work can even be approached without consummate virtuosity. Feltsman, although long a New Yorker and a denizen of the American musical scene, brought a characteristically Russian concentration and business-like lack of pretension to his execution of Prokofiev's cruelest hoops and ladders. All details in place, he focused on pulse and expression, while avoiding distracting games with color. Along with the power and energy of his performance, I could imagine him a chess master as well. Insight and purpose were apparent in the slightest detail of his performance. Repin also faced a virtuosic work, but a more lyrical one, which called for delicate nuance and color along with an occasional flight of display. In Gergiev there cannot have been a more attentive and flexible accompanist in either concerto.

These four concerts have already given ample evidence of the extreme range of Prokofiev's imagination, which at times clashes with itself, or at the very least strikes us as contradictory. This is most astonishingly apparent in three of the works he produced in the chaos of the First World War and the growing revolution: the First Symphony, the First Violin Concerto, and the Cantata Semero Ikh ("They are seven."). In the symphony and the concerto Prokofiev endeavored to put the excesses of post-Wagnerian romanticism to rest—the symphony through its classicizing style and the concerto through an introspective, quasi-romantic vein, colored by Debussy and Scriabin. In the cantata, a setting of the theosophist poet Bal'mont's Russian version of an Akkadian incantation, he was clearly still working with inspiration from the heady days of the Russian Silver Age, which was rapidly coming to a close. None of these works showed the slightest concern with the political upheavals of the time.

If there are cracks in the vessel of the First Symphony, Gergiev reached straight out for them. Using a full complement of strings, Gergiev steered a course that duly observed the neat, classical articulation of his stylish tunes, but also undermined them by making the most of passing dissonances and the rich, dark sonorities from the lower strings. In Gergiev's view there is constant tension between the chosen classical style of the work and the modern vagaries of its harmony. This established a communality between it and the violin concerto.

Prokofiev's ambition was apparent enough in these spare, anti-romantic works, in which he was daring to point to the future in his own way, but it was admittedly getting a little pushy in the Second Symphony, and this may have ultimately been the reason for its failure. Prokofiev may have just been trying too hard, and his sophisticated audience was put off by it. Harlow Robinson called it Prokofiev's "lost" symphony. In his lecture he asked for a show of hands, if anyone had heard the work in the concert hall, and I saw none raised. (I didn't raise mine either.) On the other hand, the Second Symphony proved to be a constantly absorbing, challenging work. If it is ambitious, it is ambitious in entirely the right way. It is flawlessly constructed, and not a bar is empty or uninteresting—I wish I could say the same of Romeo and Juliet. Its relentless ostinato is reminiscent of Semero Ikh, which is a magnificent piece. In the symphony Prokofiev brings it from the world of ancient chant to the machine age, recalling on the way the manner of Stravinsky and Les Sept. The French element is unmistakable. Gergiev plunged into the symphony's vast range of sonority with full commitment. He certainly won over this listener.

In the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, which are more contained but equally important works, Gergiev's combination of passion, structure, and clarity were also totally persuasive. The Sixth, which Prokofiev first wanted to dedicate to the memory of Beethoven, takes an particularly allusive course. Hommages to Tchaikovsky and Mahler weave in and out of the otherwise characteristically Prokofievan score. As well-put-together as it is—there is constant feedback between rolling sextuple tunes, sharp outbursts, and brutal silences—the Sixth can only be bracing, but it is also a very sad work—tortured at the very end. One wonders how the symphony was performed at all. Of course the rituals of Soviet criticism were effective at clearing the Soviet air, if nothing else. Today we can relate to this masterpiece as one of Prokofiev's most heartfelt expressions, if partially hidden under Stalin-era gestures and indirection. The Seventh is a tamer and more accessible work, although Prokofiev's stated intention of writing a children's symphony seems once again to be Stalin-era "irony." (On the other hand, it seems that one of the signal virtues of Soviet artistic policy was the avoidance of condescension to children.) Here Prokofiev's despair emerges in a more lyrical, elegiac vein. Gergiev approached each work with a keen sense of their individuality of mood, expression, and environment.

The could not have been a more impressive harbinger of Gergiev's tenure in London or a more eloquent testimony to Prokofiev's tragic artistic life.