Programme Notes · London Symphony Orchestra · 10 December 2026
Noseda’s Prokofiev and Shostakovich, with Kavakos
v3 · updated 30 September 2026 · 9 sources
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v3 · 30 September 2026 · Further reading added
- Added three recommended books: Robinson's Prokofiev, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, Prokofiev's Diaries 1915-1923
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v2 · 30 September 2026 · Sources added; house-style edit
- Added 6 sources
- Removed em dashes
- Noseda bio: birthplace corrected to near Milan (Sesto San Giovanni); 'for over a decade' at Teatro Regio removed; BBC Philharmonic title given as Chief Conductor
- Three Oranges: 'radio and film theme for decades' made specific (theme of the radio drama The FBI in Peace and War)
- Shostakovich VC2: removed unverified claim that the prominent horn is 'an Oistrakh in-joke' and the unsourced 'endlessly singing' quotation; cadenzas placed as documented
- Chout: plot detail trimmed to what sources support (merchant rather than 'assorted merchants and soldiers')
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v1 · 22 June 2026 · First published
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)
The Love for Three Oranges, Suite, Op. 33bis16 min
About the Work
Prokofiev’s opera The Love for Three Oranges is a gleeful absurdist comedy. Based on an eighteenth-century fairy-tale play by Carlo Gozzi, it tells of a hypochondriac prince cursed to fall in love with three oranges, and is full of magicians, card games and theatrical self-mockery. Prokofiev wrote it for Chicago, where it premiered in 1921, and from its sparkling score he drew a concert suite of six movements that has long outshone the opera itself in popularity. It catches Prokofiev at his most witty, brilliant and acerbic, fresh from his early years as the enfant terrible of Russian music.
The suite’s most famous number by far is the March, a quirky, strutting, sardonic little tune that became one of Prokofiev’s signature pieces (for years it was the theme of the American radio drama The FBI in Peace and War). Around it the suite gathers other vivid episodes from the opera: eerie magic, grotesque comedy and brilliant orchestral colour. It makes a bright, characterful opening to Noseda’s Russian programme.
What to Listen For
Listen above all for the famous March, which you may well recognise: a jaunty, slightly sinister tune with a clipped, marching rhythm and Prokofiev’s trademark ‘wrong-note’ wit, brassy and irresistible. The Scherzo that follows is all glittering, scurrying activity, conjuring the opera’s magic and mischief.
Across the suite’s six short movements, listen for Prokofiev’s brilliant, sardonic orchestration and his love of the grotesque and the comic: sudden contrasts, mock-pompous fanfares, eerie atmospheres for the opera’s sorcerers, and splashes of bright colour. It is music of theatrical flair and sharp humour, a perfect curtain-raiser, and a reminder of why Prokofiev was considered the wittiest of the great twentieth-century Russians.
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)
Violin Concerto No. 2 in C-sharp minor, Op. 12933 min
About the Work
Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto is his last concerto: a late, autumnal, deeply introspective work, written in 1967 as a gift for the great violinist David Oistrakh, who had also premiered the First Concerto and to whom this one is dedicated. (Shostakovich intended it for Oistrakh’s 60th birthday, though he miscalculated and the violinist was turning 59.) Where the First Concerto is a vast, four-movement drama, the Second is more compact, shadowy and inward: the music of a composer in his sixties, in failing health, writing in a spare, often bleak late style shot through with private allusions.
It is a difficult, unshowy work that rewards close listening: prevailingly quiet, melancholy and full of song, built around long, brooding melodic lines for the soloist rather than display. Even the key, C-sharp minor, is an awkward one for the violin. There are flashes of Shostakovich’s characteristic bitter humour and savage energy, but the overriding mood is one of introspection, loneliness and a kind of weary nobility. It is a connoisseur’s concerto, and a profound one, ideally suited to a soloist of Leonidas Kavakos’s depth and seriousness.
What to Listen For
Listen for the prevailing mood of shadowy introspection. The first movement (Moderato) opens with a brooding, long-breathed melody for the soloist over dark orchestral colours. This is music of melancholy and unease rather than brilliance, though it builds to anguished climaxes and ends with a contrapuntal cadenza. Listen, too, for Shostakovich’s spare, sometimes desolate orchestration: solo woodwinds, low strings, ominous horn calls.
The slow movement (Adagio) is the concerto’s lyrical heart: a long, sorrowing, song-like meditation of great tenderness, the violin singing over hushed accompaniment. The finale brings more energy and some of Shostakovich’s grotesque, sardonic wit (driving rhythms, sharp accents, a sense of bitter dance) and includes a further long cadenza. But even here the music keeps returning to shadow. Listen for the prominent horn writing and for the way the concerto ends not in triumph but in a kind of hard, ambiguous defiance. It is late Shostakovich at his most personal and searching.
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)
Chout (The Tale of the Buffoon), Suite, Op. 21bis35 min
About the Work
Chout (a French rendering of the Russian word for ‘buffoon’ or ‘jester’) was Prokofiev’s first ballet for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. He composed it in 1915 and extensively revised it for the 1921 Paris premiere, with designs by the avant-garde artist Mikhail Larionov. The story, drawn from Russian folk tales, is a grotesque, knockabout comedy: a clever buffoon outwits seven other buffoons (and a merchant along the way) through a series of increasingly absurd deceptions involving a ‘magic’ whip, a disguise as a woman and a faked death. From this riotous score Prokofiev drew a substantial twelve-movement orchestral suite.
The music is brash, brilliant and folk-flavoured, full of Prokofiev’s youthful energy and love of the grotesque: stamping dances, garish orchestral colours, lyrical interludes and sardonic humour. It is less subtle than his later ballets but enormously vivid and entertaining, a riot of orchestral invention. As the substantial closing work of Noseda’s programme, it sends the audience off with Prokofiev at his most exuberant and theatrical.
What to Listen For
This is a sequence of twelve vivid scenes, so enjoy the colour and contrast. Listen for the brash, stamping dance rhythms and the folk-tune flavour that runs through the score: Prokofiev drawing on Russian popular idioms but twisting them with his characteristic harmonic ‘wrong notes’ and grotesque humour. There are wild, raucous numbers (the buffoons’ antics, market scenes) set against gentler, more lyrical interludes (such as the dance of the buffoons’ daughters).
Listen, too, for Prokofiev’s brilliant and sometimes deliberately crude orchestration: blaring brass, scurrying woodwinds, percussion adding to the knockabout energy. The mood is comic, even cartoonish, full of theatrical flair and physical exuberance. You don’t need to follow the convoluted plot; simply enjoy the riot of invention and the sheer rhythmic vitality of young Prokofiev writing for the most glamorous ballet company in the world.
Tonight's Artists
Leonidas Kavakosviolin
Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto is a soloist’s challenge of a particular kind: not a vehicle for display but a profound, introspective, prevailingly quiet work that rewards depth, concentration and a beautiful sustained tone over flash. Leonidas Kavakos, renowned for the aristocratic seriousness and refinement of his playing, is an ideal interpreter: a violinist who can sustain the concerto’s long, brooding lines and convey its shadowy inwardness, finding the music’s weary nobility rather than merely its (considerable) difficulties.
Leonidas Kavakos, born in Athens in 1967, is one of the most revered violinists in the world. He swept the major competitions early, winning the Sibelius, Paganini and Naumburg prizes, and made his name with a sensational recording of the original version of the Sibelius Concerto, long withheld from performance, which won Gramophone’s Concerto of the Year. Trained in Greece and with Josef Gingold in the United States, he is admired for the depth, integrity and aristocratic poise of his playing, a sound of great refinement and inner intensity rather than mere flash. He performs and records widely with the world’s leading orchestras, is increasingly active as a conductor, and plays the 1734 ‘Willemotte’ Stradivarius.
Further reading
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Accessible Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography
Harlow Robinson, Northeastern University Press 2002
A full, readable life of Prokofiev covering his years with Diaghilev and in America, when he wrote Chout and The Love for Three Oranges.
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Accessible Shostakovich: A Life Remembered
Elizabeth Wilson, Princeton University Press 2006
Shostakovich’s life told through the memories of people who knew him, a vivid way into the late years of the Second Violin Concerto, written for David Oistrakh.
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Deeper Sergey Prokofiev Diaries, 1915-1923: Behind the Mask
Sergey Prokofiev, Cornell University Press 2008
Prokofiev’s own diary for exactly the years of Chout and The Love for Three Oranges, in English translation, for readers who want the composer in his own words.