At A Glance
Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 was written around the time he ended his touring career in the West to return to Russia, which he had left two decades earlier following the Revolution (he first arrived in America through Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco). The piece unites all four streams in his compositional style: classical, modern, motoric, and lyrical.
Although Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was far less of a musical nationalist than his contemporaries known as the “Mighty Handful” or “Russian Five,” he did entertain an ongoing interest in Slavic folk music, which reached a high-point in his Symphony No. 2. Tchaikovsky would ultimately travel a path more beholden to Germanic symphonic traditions, but this energetic score suggests fleetingly that the Russian Five could have become the Russian Six.