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Friday 5 June 2009 at 7.30pm
Evgeny Kissin piano
Prokofiev
Ten Pieces from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ – excerpts
Piano Sonata No. 8
INTERVAL 20 minutes
Chopin
Polonaise-Fantaisie
Three Mazurkas
Études – excerpts
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Notes
Sergey Prokofiev (1891–1953)
Ten Pieces from ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Op. 75 (1937) – excerpts
No. 4, ‘Juliet as a young girl’ • No. 8, ‘Mercutio’ • No. 6, ‘Montagues
and Capulets’
Piano Sonata No. 8 in B flat major, Op. 84 (1939–44)
1 Andante dolce – Allegro moderato (inquieto) – Andante dolce, come prima – Allegro
2 Andante sognando
3 Vivace – Allegro ben marcato – Andantino – Vivace, come prima
Tonight’s concert juxtaposes the music of two of the
greatest composer-pianists in history, composers whose
music is intimately bound up with great Russian pianists,
past and present. For both Chopin and Prokofiev, their
own performances were an important way of
disseminating their music, even if Chopin was hardly
physically suited to the glittering large-scale recitals with
which Liszt conquered the musical world.
Prokofiev is the starting-point this evening. He was
certainly no slouch when it came to keyboard wizardry
and he seems to have delighted in getting a rise out of
the more conservative of audience-members (even
though, as we know from his own recordings, his playing
was more about finesse than heft and pure velocity). This
review of the Second Sonata by Richard Aldrich, which
appeared in the New York Times on 21 November 1918,
was typical of its time, and probably had the composer
rubbing his hands in glee:
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The Sonata, a second one, contains no sustained musical
development. The finale of the work evoked visions of a
charge of mammoths on some vast immemorial Asiatic
plateau … Prokofiev uses, like Arnold Schoenberg, the entire
modern harmonies. The House of Bondage of normal key
relations is discarded. He is a psychologist of the uglier
emotions. Hatred, contempt, rage – above all, rage –
disgust, despair, mockery and defiance legitimately serve as
models for moods.
What Mr Aldrich would have made of the works that
we hear tonight, we can only speculate. Though
Prokofiev’s ballet-score Romeo and Juliet is now duly
acknowledged as one of the masterpieces in the
medium, it was initially rejected and pronounced
undanceable by the Kirov Ballet, who had
commissioned it. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, given
that Russian ballet companies were notoriously
conservative at this time. In lieu of a performance of the
Notes
complete work in Russia, Prokofiev set about making the
music known through his orchestral suites and a set of ten
pieces for piano, Op. 75. For the latter he rearranged the
original order to create a satisfying freestanding drama.
It’s striking how at home this music sounds on the
keyboard: Prokofiev – like Ravel – seems to have been
able to switch readily between the two media, and
frequently transcribed orchestral works (or suites from
works) for solo piano, often relatively literally. And the
spirit of the dance also transfers effortlessly from one
medium to another, brilliantly demonstrated in the three
pieces Evgeny Kissin has selected.
First, ‘Juliet as a young girl’, her skittishness contrasting
with warmly delicate sections which suggests a romantic
soul (and how difficult it is to separate this from the image
of the young Margot Fonteyn, for so long peerless in this
role), the beseeching quality to the fore, but also the
changeability of her moods. She is, after all, a teenager.
Next, we have ‘Mercutio’, a vivid character-sketch by
Prokofiev of Shakespeare’s complex figure, combining
playfulness, sarcasm and anxiety in equal measure.
Such is the skill of his reimagining that you don’t feel the
loss of the sustained string chords near the beginning of
the piece.
The selection ends with ‘Montagues and Capulets’ – one
of the catchiest depictions of conflict in all music, its brutal
left-hand writing crushing all before it. This gives way to a
central section that reminds us of Juliet’s music but this is
once again subsumed by the menacing march of the
opening – a potently symbolic moment even when
divorced from the original mise en scène.
There’s menace aplenty in Prokofiev’s Eighth Piano
Sonata too, the final part in his trilogy dubbed the ‘war
sonatas’. All three were begun in 1939, although at that
time the Soviet Union had yet to become embroiled in the
war, and was still labouring under the illusion that it
3
Notes
wouldn’t become so (an illusion rudely shattered in 1941).
The Eighth Sonata was completed in 1944 and received
its first public outing in December that year, in the hands
of the great Emil Gilels. Even his advocacy wasn’t enough
to convince the audience, however, who were perplexed
by the seemingly incongruous combination of large-scale
lyricism with violent interjections. It’s the most symphonic
of Prokofiev’s nine piano sonatas, and less readily
assimilable than its companion ‘war’ pieces, Nos 6 and 7.
Though its demands are immense, it’s also the least
blatantly virtuoso of the three. Vladimir Ashkenazy,
himself a great interpreter of the work, has this to say:
yet from the start the mood is unsettled and, as the
movement progresses (and picks up speed, as the note
values become smaller and smaller, a device also
beloved of Beethoven), the landscape becomes starker
still, the harmonies darken and any semblance of peace
is shattered.The violence spills over as the main ideas are
developed, with the dreamscape returning in an
extensive reprise. Prokofiev has one more shock up his
sleeve: the sudden appearance of a fiercely energetic
coda, which is just as abruptly quelled into silence.
Ashkenazy goes on to speculate why such a great work is
relatively unappreciated in the West, not at all the case in
Russia where it has enjoyed the advocacy of a
distinguished lineage of pianists – not only Ashkenazy
and Gilels, but also Sviatoslav Richter, Andrei Gavrilov,
Tatyana Nikolaieva, Grigory Sokolov, Mikhail Pletnev …
the list goes on, with Evgeny Kissin this evening taking his
place in that pantheon.
The finale – another large-scale movement – spews out
handfuls of notes in the composer’s familiar motoric style.
On the surface it’s the most straightforward of the three
movements, but there’s more to it than simply energy and
brutalism: a central idea returns us to the unsettled mood
of the first movement, while Prokofiev’s quasi-triumphant
ricocheting coda is surely as mocking and emotionally
ambiguous as anything to be found in Shostakovich.
The spacious first movement Andante dolce opens as a
symphony of euphony, with bell-like left-hand sonorities,
INTERVAL 20 minutes
The compact minuet-like second movement, marked
Andante sognando (dreamily), is often dismissed as a
If in the Seventh Sonata we are confronted with an objective
brief intermission of light relief. But its role is every bit as
important as Beethoven’s comparably sized movements
picture of war, in the Eighth Sonata the composer looks at it
as a not-too-distant (but not an immediate) experience – and, in his late sonatas and quartets. Its air of introspective
regret also reveals a gnawing disquiet in the way
what is important, an intimate experience. The presence of
war became part of his life and everything was influenced by Prokofiev obsessively works his opening idea until it
it and connected with it.
becomes all-pervasive.
4
Notes
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Polonaise-Fantaisie in A flat major, Op. 61 (1846)
Mazurkas – C sharp minor, Op. 30 No. 4 (1837); A flat major, Op. 41
No. 4 (1839); A minor, Op. 59 No. 1 (1845)
Études, Op. 10 (1829–32) – No. 1 in C major; No. 2 in A minor; No. 3 in
E major; No. 4 in C sharp minor; No. 12 in C minor.
Études, Op. 25 (1832–6) – No. 5 in E minor; No. 6 in G sharp minor;
No. 11 in A minor.
It was with the music of Chopin that Evgeny Kissin
first came to international attention. The date was
27 March 1984; the place, the Great Hall of the Moscow
Conservatoire. Kissin was just 12. His performance of
Chopin’s two concertos, plus a couple of mazurkas and
a waltz as encores, was recorded and history was made.
He has been immutably associated with the composer
ever since. Tonight’s selection of pieces offers a portrait
of Chopin the man of high passions and the musical
innovator – a far cry from the dandy of the drawingroom of popular mythology.
Chopin alluded to his Polonaise-Fantaisie in a letter to
his parents on 12 December 1845:
I should like now to finish my cello sonata, Barcarolle and
something else I don’t know how to name.
That ‘something else’ was to turn into one of his last and
finest masterpieces. A combination of polonaise and
fantasy might seem an unlikely marriage, the latter
having the potential to water down the polonaise’s
defining rhythmic contour. But Chopin was used to
creating new structures to house his unique musical ideas
and this novel hybrid is as successful as any, though it
certainly confused early listeners, among them Liszt. In
the Polonaise-Fantaisie we find a combination of strong
narrative (the very opening, like that of the Prokofiev
sonata we’ve just heard, has a ‘once upon a time’ feel
about it), reverie and majesty, elements that Chopin
draws together with the mastery of one at the very top of
his game. About three-quarters of the way through, listen
out for the way the music seems to hover, motionless, with
an extended trill that starts out as a single voice, building
up to four; or the reprise of the main polonaise idea at
the final climax, as it triumphantly rings out from the most
involved of textures.
Asked to choose one genre which encapsulates the very
heart of Chopin, many would propose the mazurka.
Perhaps even more than the nocturne, waltz and
polonaise, he took this form to an entirely new artistic
level without sacrificing its essential features. He wrote
mazurkas throughout his life, and within their modest
span he conducted experiments more radical than in any
other medium, not only harmonically and melodically,
but in the possibilities of the form’s essential asymmetry
too. Nor, in bringing it into the salon, did he lose any of
the genre’s essential wildness or primitivism. The term
5
Notes
‘mazurka’ refers to three dances from the Mazovia
region of Poland – the mazur, the oberek and the
kujawiak. All three are in triple-time, with strong
accentuation on the second or third beat, but beyond
that they encompass a vast range of moods, just as
Chopin’s own mazurkas do. And that is both the
challenge and the allure for performers, especially if
accounts of the composer’s own playing are to be
believed. There’s a famous story of Meyerbeer
hearing Chopin play a mazurka (Op. 63 No. 3)
with such free rubato that he assumed Chopin’s timing
was off. He pointed out that it sounded as if it was in
4/4, so prolonged was the first beat. Chopin insisted
that he was playing in triple time. When Meyerbeer
(perhaps unwisely) laboured the point by beating
time to his playing, the latter is said to have screamed
in rage.
And Robert Schumann, reviewing the set of Four
Mazurkas, Op. 30, with typical perspicacity noted,
‘Chopin has elevated the mazurka to a small art form; he
has written many, yet few among them resemble each
other. Almost every one contains some poetic trait,
something new in form and expression.’
altogether more forceful, venturing through a range of
obscure keys before finally coming to a standstill.
Op. 41 No. 4 was almost certainly composed during
Chopin’s miserable stay on Majorca (where he wrote
several of the preludes) and he played the complete set
of four in one of his rare public recitals, on 26 April 1841,
for which the audience of 300 each paid the extravagant
sum of 20 francs per ticket. This mazurka’s hesitant
modality, wavering emotions and music-box persistence
seem designed to disorientate and bewitch the listener –
as much now as when it was newly written.
Finally, Op. 59 No. 1, the first of a set of three, written in
July 1845, a time of utmost turmoil in Chopin’s life as his
relationship with Georges Sand finally went into
meltdown. The strong accentuation in the outer sections
contrasts with the inner one, where the right-hand
melody seems to float free of the barlines.
It’s difficult now to imagine the impact of the publication
of Chopin’s Op. 10 set of Études, in Leipzig in 1833. The
composer was barely 23, and it was quite some callingcard, rightfully placing him far above the dozens of
piano virtuosos who were crowding the salons at that
time. And needfully too, for Chopin’s fragile health meant
The three we hear tonight share the traits of strongly
that he was fundamentally unsuited to large-scale
dotted rhythmic profiles, wide-ranging harmonic journeys
performance. Appropriately enough, he dedicated the
and the tendency to worry away obsessively at the tiniest
set to Franz Liszt. Together with the Op. 25 set, published
scraps of melody, but there the similarities end.
four years later, these studies are unique in not losing
their didactic purpose even though they are absolutely
In Op. 30 No. 4, set above a bagpipe-like drone, the
made for the concert hall. As the great musicologist
mood veers between melancholy and something
6
Notes
Donald Tovey wrote in 1900, ‘they are the only extant
great works of art that really owe their character to their
being études’. Chopin throws down the gauntlet in
Op. 10 No. 1, combining a palpable muscularity with a
chorale melody, the brilliance (and difficulty) of the
arpeggio figuration increased by the fact that it is spread
over a tenth rather than an octave. And Chopin exploits
the entire range of the piano, as if declaring himself
master of all he surveys.
The quicksilver second Étude might be less blatantly
extrovert but, as anyone who has tried to play it will
know, it places a cruel emphasis on the weakest fingers
of the right hand, simultaneously demanding complete
evenness of touch.
The third, bathing the listener in a mellow E major, has
proved irresistible to arrangers over the decades, from
solo crooners to full-blown choral treatment, but such
indignities cannot detract from its rapturous tenderness,
the brief, angst-laden inner section, with its unsettling
harmonies, finally subsumed by the simple beauty of that
opening melody.
after Chopin heard of Warsaw’s capture by Russia. Who
knows whether there’s any truth in the story – but it does
encapsulate the Étude’s ferocious drama, with nobility
combined with a seething anger, an effect emphasised
by its brusque finish.
Like Op. 10 No. 4, the virtuosity of Op. 25 No. 5 doesn’t
become fully apparent until you try and play it:
simultaneously maintaining the outline of the melody and
the sharpness of the dotted rhythm accompaniment in the
right hand and the wide-spread arpeggiated chords in
the left – all at Vivace – is no mean feat. But as Chopin
demonstrates in every single étude, the difficulties are
always to a greater musical end, never merely a technical
one. The central section, which revels (as in Op. 10 No. 3)
in the warmth of E major, brings forth yet another
heaven-sent melody. Chopin offers his pianist no respite,
following this Étude with a fearsome study in double
thirds, and another example of his genius in raising a
technical device to pure poetry.
The final Étude in Evgeny Kissin’s selection, No. 11, picks
up the chromatic figuration of No. 6 but casts it in a quite
different role. It has been nicknamed ‘Winter Wind’ and
No. 4 offers yet another contrast – with the two hands
it’s easy to understand why, with its unabating ferocity
engaged in a manic game of chase, constantly swapping
and its desolate A minor key. It’s remarkable to think that
over ideas, the diminished harmonies and semitonal
the four-bar introduction, the only moment of stillness in
movement adding to its frenetic energy.
the entire piece, was in fact an afterthought.
Evgeny Kissin finishes his selection from Op. 10 with the
Programme notes © Harriet Smith
last of the set. It earned the nickname ‘Revolutionary’
through the legend that it was written in a fury in 1831,
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7
About the performer
Sasha Gusov/EMI Classics
Evgeny Kissin piano
Evgeny Kissin was born in
Moscow in 1971 and began to
play by ear and improvise on
the piano at the age of 2. At
6 he entered the Moscow
Gnessin School of Music
where he was a student of
Anna Pavlovna Kantor, who
has remained his only teacher.
He came to international
attention when he performed
Chopin’s piano concertos at
the age of 12 under Dmitri Kitaienko.
Since his first appearances outside Russia in 1985, he has
played with all of the leading orchestras and conductors
and in recital in all of the world’s greatest halls. Last
season he recorded all five Beethoven concertos with
Sir Colin Davis, Prokofiev’s Second and Third Concertos
with Vladimir Ashkenazy, both Brahms’s piano concertos
with James Levine and Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos 20
and 27 with the Kremerata Baltica.
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8
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In 1992 he performed at the Grammy Awards, broadcast
live to an audience estimated at over one billion, and in
1995 he became Musical America’s youngest
Instrumentalist of the Year. In 1997 he received the
prestigious Triumph Award for his outstanding
contribution to Russia’s culture. The same year he was the
first musician to give a solo recital at the BBC Proms. In
2001 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music
by the Manhattan School of Music. In 2003 he received
the Shostakovich Award, one of Russia’s highest musical
honours, and in 2005 he was awarded an Honorary
Membership of the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Evgeny Kissin’s recordings have received numerous
awards, including a Grammy, the Edison Klassik, the
Diapason d’Or and the Grand Prix of La Nouvelle
Academie du Disque.
This season, Evgeny Kissin will give recitals with Dmitri
Hvorostovsky in Frankfurt, Munich, Paris and London and
give solo recitals throughout Europe, the USA, Japan and
south-east Asia.
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