Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Quintet in G minor, Op.39, for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and bass
Theme and Variations:
Moderato
Andante energico
Allegro sostenuto, ma con brio
Adagio pesante
Allegro precipitato, ma non troppo presto
Andantino

Prokofiev was at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire in the politically restive decade up to the outbreak of the 1914 war. A brilliant but headstrong pupil, he was in constant rebellion against what he saw as the Conservatoire’s traditionalism and graduated with a final, flamboyant snub to Glazunov by performing his own First Piano Concerto to win the coveted Rubinstein Prize. After the war and the Revolution, he found that his brand of anti-traditional iconoclasm perfectly suited the mood of the time, first in the USA, and then in Paris, where Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes were enjoying a renewed vogue. In that environment, the artistic world of Cocteau, Poulenc, Satie and Stravinsky, Prokofiev’s Quintet Op.39 has its origins.

In 1924 a touring Russian ballet company, Ballets Romanov, had commissioned Prokofiev to write a score for "Trapeze", a ballet based on circus life – to be scored for their small touring band of oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and bass. By his own admission, Prokofiev saw this as another opportunity to show his enfant terrible credentials and wrote a work that was intended as pure music, with little regard for the needs of the ballet. Not surprisingly, it proved unusable – the alternating 5/4 and 10/8 bars in the third movement proved particularly uncongenial to dance - and once the ballet idea was dropped he wasted no time in re-arranging the score as this Quintet, Op.39. Pungent, spiky and wonderfully colourful, it is one of Prokofiev’s most "modern" works, and attracted particular criticism for "formalism" after the Soviet trap had closed round the composer in the 1930s. Frightened, Prokofiev blamed "the Parisian atmosphere, where complex patterns and dissonances were the accepted thing, and which fostered my predilection for complex thinking". The Quintet certainly has the flavours of "Les Six" and the Stravinsky of "Histoire du soldat", but its piquant wit and the lively cut of its melodies are all pure Prokofiev, recognisably the work of the great ballet composer who was to write "Romeo and Juliet" 11 years later.

RGB 2002


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