Search - Sergey Prokofiev, Matti Raekallio :: Romeo and Juliet

Intriguing Prokofiev, Well Known and Not So

M. C. Passarella | Lawrenceville, GA | 10/17/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a more varied program than may first appear, showing two distinct sides of Prokofiev. Even putting aside his greatest piano music, the sonatas, he wrote some of the most brilliant compositions for that instrument produced in the 20th century. Most famous, perhaps, are the Visions Fugitives. More uncompromisingly modernist, however, are the Sarcasms, which are gnomic, gnarly, even brutal, as the notes (written by the pianist himself) to this recording say. Just as uncompromising are the etudes, penned remarkably when Prokofiev was eighteen in 1909. They show that even then he was ready to shed the late-Romantic musical world or Rimsky and Scriabin and take on the tough, glittery brilliance and pounding rhythms that mark his modernist compositions.



Written three years later, the Toccata sounds like an abandoned cadenza from his First Piano Concerto, taking the pianist all over the keyboard in a series of nervous, skittery runs. Like the concerto, it is far more playful than the etudes, which are all cast in minor keys.



In stark contrast to Prokofiev's fledgling modernism is the group known as Old Grandmother's Tales (1918), which meander in a quiet, ruminative sort of way. All are in slow tempos to match the character of the eponymous tale teller. They hint at the populist Prokofiev, the beloved composer of musical fables, who emerged once he returned to Russian in the 1930s. That's the composer of Romeo and Juliet (1936-7), of course, and yet the piano transcription of the same has much of the surface brilliance and rhythmic drive of the modernist music of Prokofiev's youth.



Finnish pianist Matti Raekellio has the big, big technique needed to toss of those wild etudes and the bounding Mercutio section of "Romeo," as well the sensibility needed to make the Grandmother's Tales communicate in their very different, tenderly discursive way. An attractive and intriguing program, and Ondine's recording is highly realistic, first-rate in every way."