Prokofiev Plays Prokofiev on Parnassus

courtesy of New Sounds Consulting

According to my archives, I have not had an encounter with Parnassus Records since 2016, the year in which that label released a recording of Sviatoslav Richter playing both Books of The Well-Tempered Clavier over the course of four recitals in Innsbruck in July and August of 1973. What made this album particularly interesting is that the entire content was packaged on a single Audio DVD (which, unless I am mistaken, contributes tracks from time to time on the Music Choice Classical Masterpieces cable channel). Parnassus found its way back on my radar after it released an album entitled Prokofiev on the Air about two months ago.

The content consists of a radio broadcast on WABC in New York on January 16, 1937, which took place in the Columbia Concert Hall. To be fair, this broadcast accounts for only about half of the album. The remainder is devoted to recordings of three of the early collections of short pieces for solo piano, the four Opus 3 pieces composed in 1911, the four Opus 4 pieces composed between 1910 and 1912, and the ten Opus 12 pieces composed between 1906 and 1913. The tracks were taken from an album on the Russian Melodya label recorded by Prokofiev’s assistant, Anatoly Vedernikov.

Most of the selections on this album do not currently receive very much attention. For most listeners the closest to familiarity will probably be found in Prokofiev’s performance of eight of the twenty short pieces in his Opus 22 Visions fugitives (fugitive visions), composed between 1915 and 1917. These days this collection is one of the few Prokofiev compositions for solo piano that get much exposure. (The others would probably be the three “war” sonatas, Opus 82 in A major, Opus 83 in B-flat major,  and Opus 84 in B-flat major, all composed during World War II.) Given that I tend to look forward to opportunities to listen to Opus 22 in recital, I was more than a little disappointed that the broadcast did not include the entire set; but I can understand that WABC probably assumed that most of its listeners would not have had the necessary attention span.

On the other hand the Vedernikov recordings provided me with my “first contact” with those early collections of short pieces. I am not sure why current recitalists shy away from them. Perhaps they assume that an audience that sees Prokofiev’s name on the program expects to experience more of his technical fireworks.