Symphony No. 4 in C major, Op. 112 (1947 version)

Program notes

About the Work

Prokofiev’s Fourth Symphony has an unusual double life. He first wrote it in 1929–30, drawing on music he had composed for the ballet The Prodigal Son for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes; that original version (Op. 47), premiered in Boston in 1930, was compact (about twenty-two minutes) and made little impression. Nearly two decades later, in 1947, fresh from the triumph of his heroic, broadly-spanned Fifth Symphony, he returned to the neglected Fourth and reworked it so thoroughly, expanding it to some thirty-seven minutes and deepening and grandly amplifying its material, that he gave it a new opus number, 112, considering it effectively a new work. It is this larger, more imposing 1947 version that we hear tonight.

The symphony’s fortunes did not immediately improve. In early 1948, just after Prokofiev completed the revision, the notorious Zhdanov decree denounced him and other leading Soviet composers for ‘formalism,’ and much of his music was banned from the concert hall. The revised Fourth was not performed in the Soviet Union until 1957, after the composer’s death. Even today it is rarely played, which makes a chance to hear it, in the hands of a great Prokofiev conductor, all the more valuable. Beneath its ballet origins lie some of the composer’s most attractive lyrical ideas, now clothed in the grand, heroic manner of his maturity.

What to Listen For

Keep in mind the symphony’s roots in The Prodigal Son: much of its melodic material has the vivid, characterful quality of ballet music: themes that seem to depict scenes and gestures. Listen for Prokofiev’s unmistakable fingerprints throughout: the bittersweet, wide-leaping lyrical melodies, the biting wit, the propulsive ‘motoric’ rhythms, and the brilliant, slightly acid orchestration.

The four movements follow a broadly classical plan, but on the expanded 1947 scale they feel grander and more heroic than the lithe original. Listen for the warm, expansive lyricism of the slow music (drawn from the ballet’s most tender pages), for the energetic outer movements with their driving momentum, and for the way Prokofiev builds the finale toward a big, affirmative close, the kind of broad, public ending he had perfected in the Fifth Symphony. It is a rare chance to get to know an unjustly neglected work by a great symphonist.