courtesy of the Universal Music Group
In the fall of 2017, Deutsche Grammophon (DG) released a “concept album” featuring Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov entitled Chopin Evocations. Each of the two CDs in the album began with one of the piano concertos by Frédéric Chopin, followed by examples of how Chopin influenced subsequent composers. That release was followed by a six-city tour of the United States, which included a Great Performers Series solo recital in Davies Symphony Hall hosted by the San Francisco Symphony.
About two months ago DG released another Trifonov concept album. The title of this one is Silver Age. Sadly, the “concept” is a bit more muddled than it was in his Chopin project; but there is definitely no faulting the quality of performance on this new two-CD offering. I therefore implore the reader to bear with me as I take issue with the “theory behind the concept” before lauding the virtues of practice. That theory is best expressed in the paragraph on the back cover of the CD release:
Daniil Trifonov invites listeners to follow him to fin de siècle Paris, Moscow, Rome, and St. Petersburg with a collection of seminal works by the three greatest exponents of Russia’s cultural Silver Age: Scriabin, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev. Each a protégé of the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, this trio of composers reflects the vibrant cocktail of colliding aesthetic and philosophical expressions during the brief, yet hugely influential period from the late 19th century to the early years of the Soviet Union. From Scriabin’s pianistic mysticism through Stravinsky’s balletic iconoclasm to Prokofiev’s sardonic pyrotechnics, Silver Age captures a unique moment in time that changed music for ever.
In the words of the unsuccessful presidential candidate Al Smith, “Let’s look at the record,” beginning with the album’s title.
The full title on the Wikipedia page for the Silver Age is “Silver Age of Russian Poetry.” There is no mention of music in any of the five paragraphs on that page. The closest any of the three composers on the Silver Age album get to that period of Russian poetry can be found when Igor Stravinsky set two poems by Konstantin Balmont for soprano and piano in 1911. This was the same year that he composed the score for the ballet “Petrushka,” one year after his first major effort for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the music for the ballet “The Firebird.” Under Diaghilev’s management, the “broth” of any new ballet was the product of multiple “cooks;” and the “Firebird” score established Stravinsky as one of those cooks, not so much a protégé as a prodigiously active partner.
Similarly, Alexander Scriabin was far from a protégé. Best known today for his solo piano music, his only piano concerto, in the key of F-sharp minor, was composed during his tenure on the faculty of the Moscow Conservatory in 1896, given its first performance in October of 1897. His connection to Diaghilev did not come about until he settled in Paris in 1907, where Diaghilev arranged for him to perform a series of concerts. More relevant is that Scriabin’s often radical departures from nineteenth-century conventions probably served as influences for both Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev. Furthermore Prokofiev also became one of Diaghilev’s “cooks,” providing scores for several new ballets first performed by the Ballets Russes.
In terms of the music presented on Silver Age, the only “Diaghilev connection” appears in arrangements for solo piano of music for “The Firebird” and “Petrushka.” Stravinsky himself composed the piano version of three excerpts from “Petrushka,” while the “Firebird” arrangements were prepared by Guido Agosti in 1928. Both of these are given refreshingly stimulating accounts by Trifonov, but most of the album is situated some distance from both the Silver Age poets and Diaghilev.
Like Chopin Evocations, Silver Age includes two concerto performances. This time Trifonov performs with the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra with Valery Gergiev on the podium. Stravinsky is the one composer not represented by a concerto. The selection that is closer to the Silver Age is Scriabin’s Opus 20, aforementioned as his only piano concerto. Since this concerto received relatively little attention, it is definitely a high point of the album; and the Trifonov-Gergiev partnership makes a solid case that this music deserves wider exposure.
The Prokofiev concerto is his Opus 16 (second) in G minor, which has a fascinating (and somewhat disconcerting) history (which has nothing to do with the Silver Age). It was completed in 1913, but the score was then destroyed in a fire, apparently in conjunction with the Russian Revolution. Prokofiev was living in Paris when he reconstructed the score in 1923. It was given its premiere the following year under the baton of Serge Koussevitzky with the composer as soloist. By this time Prokofiev had established himself as one of Diaghilev’s “cooks;” and he may have been motivated to revive his concerto to avoid being stereotyped as a ballet composer. Gergiev tends to have a way with making Prokofiev’s scores sound convincing, if not compelling; and his chemistry with Trifonov has resulted in a ferociously dynamic account of this music.
Like the Stravinsky ballet selections, none of the other solo piano performances have anything to do with the Silver Age. The first CD begins with Stravinsky’s four movement serenade designated as “Serenade in A.” Stravinsky’s biographer Eric Walter White claims that A served as a “tonic pole” in music that did not have a key as such, in either A major or A minor. The music was completed in Vienna in 1925, and Stravinsky described it as a reflection on the multi-movement serenade form, which is encountered frequently in the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Composed after the octet and the “Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments,” the serenade is one of the earliest compositions in which Stravinsky established his “neoclassical” style.
Like Stravinsky, Prokofiev is represented by three solo compositions from different periods of his life. Work on his Opus 17 Sarcasms had been preceded by his having given the Russian premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 11 set of three solo piano compositions. Like Schoenberg, Prokofiev was fascinated by the idea of abandoning a “tonic center;” but he found his own way to this objective through polytonality. All five of the movements of Opus 17, composed in 1912, are brief, less than five minutes in duration. The brevity of those pieces suggests that Prokofiev may have been also aware of the almost microscopic five movements that Anton Webern composed for string quartet in 1909 (his Opus 5).
If Opus 17 provided an opportunity to explore expressiveness at its most intense, Prokofiev expanded that opportunity to longer durations. This is most evident in the three sonatas he composed during World War II, known collectively as the “War Sonatas.” Trifonov plays the last of these, Opus 84 in B-flat major; and he invokes the same ferocious rhetoric that served his performance of the Opus 16 concerto. However, on the first CD of Silver Age, the listener is then allowed to catch his/her breath with the high spirits of the gavotte from Prokofiev’s Cinderella ballet in the composer’s own arrangement for solo piano.
Thus, while the Silver Age title may be little more than a “draw” for the potential listener, it is the music itself that deserves attention, delivering no end of impressive rewards.
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