I have loved Prokofiev's Sixth Piano Sonata since first hearing Richter's recording while I was still in my teens. Emotionally, compositionally and pianistically it is a colossal work. It is also a profoundly dark and disturbing piece of music - a piece that is very difficult for some listeners to confront and grasp. However, the sheer brutality and passion of this music have always presented an irresistible attraction for me.

It has taken many years for this complex work, so rich in content, to settle in my mind and body. As for the Romeo and Juliet ballet score - it sounds so beautiful in its original orchestral version that it is, in a sense, cheated by Prokofiev's own piano arrangement. But how gratifying it is for a single individual to be able to recreate this music! In preparing the work I found it difficult at first to break away from the orchestral version ringing in my head and to approach the work as piano music, allowing various passages to unfold differently.

However, my dramatic inspiration came from Shakespeare's text and from my own imagination, rather than from remembrances of staged performances of the ballet. In pairing these two works, I wanted to present the extremes of Prokofiev's nature. So much of the Sonata is sarcasm and darkness, while Romeo & Juliet expresses sublime tenderness and heart-breaking beauty. It is gloriously contrasting music that shows Prokofiev at his best.

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After nearly 15 years of living in the West, Prokofiev returned to his native Russia in 1933. Although he had achieved a certain degree of success in his travels, both as composer and pianist, Prokofiev never felt at home outside Russia.

"Foreign air does not suit my inspiration because I'm Russian, and that is to say the least suited of men to be an exile, to remain in a psychological climate that isn't of my race... I've got to go back. I've got to live myself back into the atmosphere of my native soil. I've got to see a real winter again, and a spring that bursts into being from one moment to the next. I've got to hear the Russian language echoing in my ears. I've got to talk to people who are my own flesh and blood so that they can give me back something I lack here: their songs - my songs."

Prokofiev went back cautiously, leaving his family in France to follow when he had settled. After a tour of Spain, Portugal and North Africa in late 1935 and early 1936, he finally settled in Moscow with his family, making his final trip to the west (England and the USA) a year later.

Prokofiev had imagined a new Russia with a mass audience for his music, but he found the opposite, along with a brutal, repressive Soviet regime. His return in 1936 coincided with the government's condemnation of Shostakovitch's opera Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk. This was the beginning of the end of freedom of expression for Soviet composers. Eventually Prokofiev fell victim to the government's criticisms and labels of "formalism". Until his death in 1953, Prokofiev's creative life was plagued with battles and the pressure of compromise.

Perhaps because solo piano music did not require the collaboration of the state apparatus, (as with ballet, opera or symphony productions) it was to his piano sonatas that Prokofiev turned to continue his experiments with tonality and form in total freedom. He began work on the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Piano Sonatas (the so-called "war" sonatas) simultaneously in 1939. The Sixth was completed in February, 1940, and performed by the composer at a private gathering, with the young pianist Sviatoslav Richter turning pages.

Richter, who would give the first public performance of this piece in November, 1940, was overwhelmed by his first impression. He later remarked:
"I had never heard anything like it. With a singular stroke the composer severed himself from the ideals of Romanticism and included in his music the shattering pulse of the 20th century ". The Sixth Sonata remains one of the greatest, and most daring works in the piano literature.

Prokofiev's large orchestral works of this time, including Romeo and Juliet, necessarily took on a greater accessibility, or "new simplicity" as the composer referred to it. During his brief visit to the United States in 1937, a prominent New York critic reviewing the orchestral suites of Romeo and Juliet went so far as to say that "Prokofiev has written music for the masses and at the same time has attained extraordinary nobility."

Prokofiev arranged Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet after he had prepared the orchestral suites from the ballet in the previous year (1936). One could say that they are actually a transcription of the suites since only one section (Dance of the Girls) differs from the two suites combined. The ten selections-contain the highlights from the ballet.

In the last twenty years of his life, the only piano works of consequence that Prokofiev produced were the final four sonatas (6-9) and the transcriptions of the Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet scores. The ballet transcriptions are works of translucence and soaring lyricism, and the sonatas are cornerstones of twentieth century music.

- ANDREW BURASHKO

 

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