Solzhenitsyn plays Prokofiev

Sviatoslav Richter programmed them together in his first American tour in 1960, an unforgettable event to all who were present for it. It’s been a while, but Ignat Solzhenitsyn offered the same program in last week’s Philadelphia Chamber Music Society series. The effect is still powerful.

Like Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev made his living in the West as a pianist, and like him he composed his own repertory, five concertos and nine sonatas ultimately among them. The Sixth Sonata is my personal favorite and for my money the finest essay in the form since Liszt.

Prokofiev hadn’t composed a keyboard sonata in 16 years when he returned to the form after the invasion of Poland in 1939. The full brunt of the war was still two years away for Russia, but no one could doubt its coming, and the Sixth is a violent work, at several points played with a pounding fist (col pugno). There is momentary relief in the more lyric sections, but even here there’s an austerity that only varies the prevailing mood without really changing it.

Prokofiev hadn’t written in an idiom so dissonant since his youth, but nothing remains now of the enfant terrible cocking a snoot at convention: These thundering chords and runs are in deadly earnest.

Tide of war turns

The Seventh Sonata is the shortest of the trilogy, and the only one to have remained consistently in the Western repertory, at least for a time. The cantabile melody of the central Andante seems sweet, almost saccharine, but it yields abruptly to a middle section of stabbing chords and icy harmonies reminiscent of the Second Piano Concerto. The Precipitato finale is a whirlwind that makes no concession to finger or ear.

By the time of Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata, the tide of war had turned in Russia’s favor, and the urgency of the previous two sonatas yields to a more generally spacious vision, albeit one punctuated by outbursts of overlaid chords and devilishly complex counterpoint. The finale features a brutal march that seems to recapitulate the drama of the entire series, and, through grotesque episodes, pounds home to a strident conclusion. There is no victory here and no consolation: War alone has won. Yet Prokofiev — and through him all of us — has at least a wry laugh: a Haydnesque joke of his own in the form of a false ending before the final chords come down.

Ignat settles in

Prokofiev later offered a more triumphalist take on the Great Patriotic War in his Fifth Symphony (1944), but these sonatas are a stark and uncompromising testament.

Ignat Solzhenitsyn was choppy to begin with, but he settled in by the end of the Sixth Sonata and was compelling thereafter, among other things drawing out the elements of Scriabin that never left Prokofiev’s music.

Such an influence may seem far afield in these thorny works, but the mercurial Prokofiev ranged over virtually the entire Russian musical tradition while retaining his distinctive personality. In a sense he needed it here, for Russia itself seems at stake in this music.

One felt it in the performance as well. It is no disservice to Solzhenitsyn to say that Richter remains the gold standard in these sonatas. Solzhenitsyn’s awkward start aside, there’s probably no living pianist who can play them better.