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Wednesday 3 February
The pianist is cast in the role of spell-master and illusionistin-chief,
conjuring up undreamt-of beings and making
them dance to his tunes, sometimes commanding the whole
charade to cease so that he can take every role himself, as in
the hypertrophic first-movement cadenza. Like the massive
cadenza in the original version of Rachmaninov’s Third, this
one occupies the structural place of a sonata recapitulation.
The opening theme then closes the narrative frame,
providing just a few seconds of calm for the soloist to
regain composure.
Then we are straight into a two-and-a-half-minute perpetualmotion
Scherzo, consisting of no fewer than 1504 continuous
semiquavers, challengingly laid out in parallel motion
between the hands. Here the soloist doubles, in effect, as
juggler and contortionist. The third movement is nominally an
Intermezzo, but in character it comes across more like a
grotesque march. Its extravagant gestures reminded
Sviatoslav Richter of ‘a dragon devouring its young’, though
when all is said and done perhaps this is only a pantomime
dragon.
For all the hand-flinging antics in the finale’s early stages, it
contains more reflective episodes than the previous two
movements. Two of these episodes have the makings of solo
cadenzas, but neither grows to the monstrous dimensions of
their counterpart in the first movement. Prokofiev was rarely
one to strain himself unduly over such matters as structural
transition, but the way he lets the second solo episode
edge back towards the main theme is a compositional
masterstroke. However, there is nothing particularly subtle
about the last few pages, which return us to the main business
of neo-Lisztian acrobatics.
Programme note © David Fanning
INTERVAL
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