Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16

Program notes

About the Work

Prokofiev was a student at the St Petersburg Conservatory, with a reputation as its enfant terrible, when he wrote his Second Piano Concerto in 1912 and 1913. While he was working on it, in April 1913, his close friend and fellow student Maximilian Schmidthof killed himself, having sent Prokofiev a farewell letter. The concerto is dedicated to his memory.

Prokofiev played the solo part himself at the first performance, on 5 September 1913 at Pavlovsk, a resort town outside St Petersburg. The accounts agree that the audience was divided and loud about it. A newspaper critic described listeners murmuring, leaving their seats and hissing, while a smaller party of progressives declared the piece a work of genius. Prokofiev noted the mixture of applause and boos in his diary and professed himself pleased that the music had provoked such strong feelings.

What that audience heard is lost. The orchestral score, which had not been published, was destroyed in a fire after the Russian Revolution. In 1923, with a Third Concerto already to his name, Prokofiev reconstructed the work. He remarked that it was so completely rewritten that it might almost be counted as his Fourth. He introduced the new version in Paris on 8 May 1924, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting.

Compared with the short, sharp First Concerto, the Second is darker and built on a much grander scale, in four movements instead of the usual three. It is also harder. It is regarded as one of the most technically formidable concertos in the repertoire.

What to Listen For

Andantino. Allegretto. The concerto opens quietly. After a couple of bars from the orchestra the piano begins a long, melancholy theme in G minor, like the start of a tale. The centre of gravity comes later: an enormous cadenza for the soloist alone, which takes up much of the second half of the movement and carries it to its climax.

Scherzo: Vivace. Two and a half minutes of perpetual motion. The pianist’s two hands race along in unison without a single rest, while the orchestra chases after them.

Intermezzo: Allegro moderato. Where a slow movement might be expected, Prokofiev writes a heavy-footed, grotesque march. One annotator compares its tread to the lumbering of some immense prehistoric beast.

Finale: Allegro tempestoso. The marking says it: a storm of leaping chords and octaves across the whole keyboard. A quieter, contrasting episode brings a brief respite before the pursuit resumes and drives to the end.