Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26

Program notes

About the Work

Sergei Prokofiev wrote five piano concertos, and the Third is the one that pianists and audiences have taken most to heart. He completed it in the summer of 1921 on the coast of France, but it was assembled from ideas he had been storing for years. The theme of the slow movement dates from 1913, and he had returned to the sketches in 1916 and 1917, around the time of his “Classical” Symphony. Like that symphony, the concerto combines clear, almost eighteenth-century outlines with harmony and rhythm that could only belong to the twentieth.

Prokofiev had left Russia in 1918, after the revolution, and was trying to make a career in the United States as a composer and pianist. He wrote the concerto for himself to play. The first performance was in Chicago on 16 December 1921, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock; the same city was staging the premiere of his opera The Love for Three Oranges that month. Shortly beforehand he wrote to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky: “My Third Concerto has turned out to be devilishly difficult. I’m nervous, and I’m practicing hard, three hours a day.”

Success was not immediate. New York, where he played the piece a month later, was cool, and he went back to Europe in 1922 discouraged. It was a performance in Paris that year, with Koussevitzky conducting, that established the concerto, and it has been a repertoire piece ever since. In 1932 Prokofiev recorded it in London with the London Symphony Orchestra, the only recording of him playing one of his own concertos.

What to Listen For

I. Andante, Allegro. A solo clarinet opens the concerto with a quiet, long-breathed lyrical melody. The strings break into a run, the tempo jumps, and the piano bursts in with a bright, hammering theme. A second idea is spikier and more sardonic. Midway the clarinet melody comes back, now sung out by the whole orchestra, before the scurrying resumes and carries the movement to its finish.

II. Tema con variazioni. The woodwinds present a theme with the gait of an old court dance, a little prim and a little wistful. Five variations follow, and they travel a long way from it. The piano begins the first with a long trill and a run up the keyboard; the second gallops; later ones are by turns stormy and dreamlike. At the end the orchestra plays the theme as it was, while the piano, in Prokofiev’s words, adds “delicate chordal embroidery”.

III. Allegro ma non troppo. Prokofiev described the finale as an argument between piano and orchestra. Bassoons and plucked strings propose a dry little theme; the piano interrupts and will not agree on the key. In the middle the tempo slackens and the woodwinds introduce a broad, slow melody, to which the piano at first replies with sarcasm. The tune then swells into the most openly romantic passage of the concerto. The opening theme returns for a long, accelerating coda that is among the most demanding stretches of piano writing in the repertoire, and the argument is settled in a blaze of C major.