At A Glance
PROKOFIEV
Piano Concerto No. 1 1911 | 16 mins
Sergei Prokofiev was still a student when he premiered his Piano Concerto No. 1. He applied himself conscientiously to learning the piano part, writing to his friend Vasily Morelev, “it’s the first time I’ll have played with an orchestra” and “I have to know it by heart to play it confidently.” The Piano Concerto No. 1 is a tightly constructed piece, its three movements (which are connected without pauses between) running only a bit longer than fifteen minutes. Prokofiev would later recognize in his life work four “basic lines," which he called classical, modern, motoric, and lyrical. What is remarkable is the extent to which this “first more-or-less mature composition” (as the composer called it) truly sounds like what would come to be considered Prokofievian. Read More
SHOSTAKOVICH
Symphony No. 7, Leningrad 1941 | 70 mins
Dmitri Shostakovich had begun his Symphony No. 7 before the Siege of Leningrad, during which German forces choked off his home city for 872 dismal days of 1942, 1943, and 1944. Still, he wrote much of it when the Siege was going on, while he and his family were evacuated to the relative safety of the Russian interior. It is a programmatic symphony to some degree, although Shostakovich wrote: “I am not aiming for the naturalistic depiction of war, the depiction of the clatter of arms, the explosion of shells, and so on. I am trying to convey the image of war emotionally.” The four movements may trace the onset of war, memories of better times, inward passions, and grandly scaled victory. Read More
