Prokofiev - Violin Concerto nr. 2

Musically (as meteorologically) it is a rather dry period. Well, dry in the sense that I'm having the feeling to be loitering whilst the backlog of unlistened CDs keeps swelling. Sometimes I get annoyed with myself because it seems I have conditioned myself (and continue to do so) to come by with little music. I have precious little time to listen to begin with. And there are periods I just don't feel like listening a lot. I'm quickly overfed. Often a 30 minutes' session is enough to satisfy my appetite. And when I listen it seems to take me ever longer to get beyond a certain piece. So the past week I have limited myself largely to Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto, op. 63, written in 1935. It' s a piece I have 'known' for a long while. Curiously, I have some strong reminiscences of reading Harlow Robinson's biography of Prokofiev many years ago. There are certain works of his which are associated in my mind with rather bright images related to the circumstances of composition: the Third Piano Concerto composed during a sun-drenched and windswept holiday on the Brittany coast, the First Violin Concerto written during the long train ride across Siberia when he left Russia in 1917. The Second Violin Concerto is in my mind associated with a sojourn of Prokofiev in Voronezh, 'black earth city', which I'm picturing as a forlorn enclave in the midst of vast agricultural fields in the Don basin. I've checked this in Robinson's book and it is indeed the case that Prokofiev stayed a little while in Voronezh in the late summer of 1935 when he was touring the USSR in preparation of establishing a permanent base there. Apparently the main theme of the Concerto's movement was composed there. However, his passage through the city is only mentioned in passing so I wonder where that strong visual association with the music comes from. It is possible that I'm mixing up Prokofiev here with the poet Osip Mandelstam who indeed spent a while in exile in Voronezh, and was living in the city at the exact point when Prokofiev passed through it. I doubt that they ever met. But Voronezh was the endgame for Mandelstam who would die in transit to a forced labour camp late in 1938. And so rereading some of the harrowing but also delirious poems from those days ("Oh the horizon steals my breath and takes it nowhere - I'm choked with space!") I have to come to the conclusion that it is with Mandelstam, not Prokofiev, that the association in my mind with Voronezh must have existed. However, the strange, trivial fact remains that Prokofiev was there, at that very same moment.

The Concerto was the last piece Prokofiev wrote in response to a non-Russian commission. It was the French violinist Robert Soetens (from Belgian descent) who was its dedicatee. Soetens appears to have been a very colourful figure, an itinerant virtuoso who would continue to play in the most unlikely places until well in old age. The concerto is a stellar example of Prokofiev's new simplicity. It's melodious to a fault, harmonically accessible and transparently scored. And yet, what strikes is that the music at times tilts in almost a rudimentary kind of non-music. Witness the strange, repetitive passage work in the slow movement and in the development section of the introductory Allegro. It reminds me of similar features in the Eighth Sonata and Fifth Symphony. Prokofiev's music, however accessible it may sound, is never straightforward but reveals a subtle emotional layering where the surreal, the ominous, the tongue-in-cheeck and the effusively lyrical meet.

I have only version in my collection, which is a 1983 CD with Shlomo Mintz as a soloist and the Chicago SO led by Abbado (on DGG). Technically, it's an eminently satisfying recording, despite it being an early digital capturing in a difficult location (Chicago's Orchestra Hall). But soloist and orchestra are very well placed in a pleasingly spacious acoustic. Mintz' luminous, cultivated, sweet yet masculine tone is very well captured. The orchestra is discreetly but glowingly present. Interpretatively it is a superb rendering, one of the reasons, likely, why I have never been tempted to seek out rival recordings. Mintz and Abbado seem to have an excellent rapport. Soloist and orchestra seamlessly blend in a performance of great intensity and humility. There's a naturalness and levelheadedness to this music making which is most convincing.

So over the past week I have been carrying this Concerto around in my mind. A reviewer in the 2010 Gramophone Classical Music Guide writes in relation to this work about the "giddy beauty and wondrous fantasy of Prokofiev's stunningly inventive inspiration". I can go along with that.