Date of composition: 1916-1917
Premiere: 18 October 1923 in the hall of the Paris Opéra,
conductor: Serge Koussevitzky, violin: Marcel Darrieux
Duration: 23 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
first performed on 1 December 1924 under the baton of Bruno Walter and with Joseph Szigeti as soloist
“The first work by Prokofiev that I liked was the First Violin Concerto,” recalled the legendary pianist Sviatoslav Richter. “No one who loves music can resist its magic. It’s like opening a window in spring and being overwhelmed by the sounds of the street.” When Richter first encountered the piece, it would still be several years before its premiere – not least because Prokofiev struggled to find a violinist willing to take on the solo part. When the concerto was finally introduced to the public in Paris in 1923, the applause was restrained – perhaps because the audience had expected something more avant-garde and provocative. Today, however, the work stands among the most important and frequently performed violin concertos of the 20th century.
Prokofiev had begun composing the concerto in 1915 at the suggestion of the Polish violinist Paweł Kochański, initially envisioning a “small concerto”, a concertino. After sketching a few ideas, however, he returned to his opera The Gambler, and only in 1917 did he complete the concerto – which then grew far beyond its original modest conception. Much of the score was written on the country estate managed by his parents. From there, Prokofiev fled to the Caucasus to escape the revolutionary turmoil following the abdication of the last tsar and the Bolshevik rise to power. In December 1917, he noted in his diary: “The unrest has not reached our doors; the Caucasus seems generally immune to it. How wise of me to have settled here.” The following year, Prokofiev left Russia and emigrated to the United States.
Prokofiev described his First Violin Concerto as “lyrical” – and indeed, it shares little with his wild, more abrasive early works, such as the Scythian Suite of 1915, with their jagged harmonies and rhythmic ferocity. The tone here is far more romantic, at times even dreamlike. Yet Prokofiev turns the traditional concerto form on its head: instead of placing a slow movement at the centre, he inserts a brief, mercurial scherzo lasting barely four minutes, while the outer movements unfold at more measured tempos. The absence of trombones and the inclusion of a harp – an instrument rarely used by Prokofiev – lend the orchestral sound a luminous, transparent quality.
The first movement opens with an ethereal violin cantilena floating over soft tremolos and trills – marked in the score sognando (“dreaming”) and pianissimo. The development reveals Prokofiev’s flair for sophisticated sonic detail, as he exploits the full range of violin articulations (alla chitarra, pizzicato, staccato). The circle closes when the finale returns to the same diaphanous textures that began the work.