Program Notes: Opening Night with Yefim Bronfman

SERGEY PROKOFIEV 
Suite from Lieutenant Kijé, Op. 60 
BORN: April 23, 1891, in Sontsovka, Ukraine 
DIED: March 5, 1953, in Moscow 
WORK COMPOSED: 1933–1934 
WORLD PREMIERE: December 21, 1934, in Paris, with Prokofiev conducting. The piece received its American premiere on October 14, 1937, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a performance that formed the basis of the first commercial recording of the work, issued in the following year. 

Long ago, it was told, Russia’s Czar received a report of a recent battle. Among other things, the document praised the exploits of a soldier whose name the Czar misread as “Kijé.” No such man existed, but rather than risk the ruler’s ire by contradicting him, his courtiers invented a fictitious lieutenant by that name. In time, the Kijé legend grew and began to take on a life of its own. Tales of his marriage and adventures circulated. When the Czar finally asked to meet this colorful officer, his underlings had to quickly arrange Kijé’s death. 

This satiric tale was set forth in a novella, published in 1927, by the writer Yury Tynyanov. Five years later, the book was made into a film with the same title, Lieutenant Kijé. To accompany it, the film’s producers commissioned music from one of the most esteemed Russian composers of the day, Sergey Prokofiev. 

Prokofiev had left his native country in 1918 and spent a decade in the West, living in the United States, Germany and France. But in 1927, he visited the Soviet Union, undertaking a concert tour that proved hugely successful. Further trips home followed during the ensuing years. Although he would not fully repatriate until 1936, Prokofiev increasingly came to center his career in his native country, where he received commissions for concert works, film scores and ballets.  

Prokofiev’s score for Lieutenant Kijé exemplifies what the composer himself described as the “new simplicity” that emerged in his music during the 1930s. This dictated easily grasped melodies, a firm tonal base and a bold, straightforward use of rhythm and instrumental colors, qualities evident in his music for Lieutenant Kijé. 

In 1934, Prokofiev extracted a concert suite from his film score, and it is in this form that the music endures today. Each of the suite’s five movements (from The Birth of Kijé to The Burial of Kijé) relates a scene from Kijé’s life. His birth is announced by a distant trumpet call and a wry march. Next comes a Romance, in which the amorous Kijé is represented primarily by the saxophone, then a comic wedding scene. The Troika movement treats us to a sleigh ride through the Russian winter. Finally, the good soldier is put to rest with full military honors. As his life is recalled, so are themes from the earlier movements. 

Paul Schiavo © 2014, revised 2026 

SERGEY RACHMANINOV  
Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, Opus 30 
BORN: Semyonovo, Russia, April 1, 1873 
DIED: Los Angeles, March 28, 1943 
WORK COMPOSED: 1909 
WORLD PREMIERE: November 28, 1909, in New York City, with the composer as piano soloist and Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony.  

Sergey Rachmaninov composed his Third Piano Concerto in 1909 and played the solo part in its initial performance, given in New York in November of that year. One of the earliest reviews of the concerto noted that its “extreme difficulties bar it from performance by any but pianists of exceptional technical powers.” The work has indeed become famous as an Everest for pianists, so much so that it served as an emblem for daunting pianistic challenge in Shine, the 1996 film about the Australian pianist David Helfgott.  

Rachmaninov composed this work at a time when his career and his production as a composer were enjoying a period of ascendency. Some years earlier, the critical failure of his First Symphony had plunged the Russian musician into a state of depression and creative torpor. For three years he idled away much of his time at the rural estates of family and friends. (One imagines his life at this time as something out of a play by Chekhov.) Eventually, however, he regained confidence in his abilities and began writing again, producing a stream of music that cemented his reputation as a composer.  

With his renewed success came new opportunities. Early in 1909, Rachmaninov received an offer to undertake an extensive concert tour of the United States. Initially, he hesitated to accept, not wishing to be absent from his family for a period of months. But the financial terms of the offer were too generous to pass up. Rachmaninov was particularly tempted by the possibility of purchasing an automobile during his stay in America.  

In accepting the American invitation, Rachmaninov agreed to compose a new piano concerto that he would perform with several orchestras. All through the spring of 1909, various obligations prevented him from working on this piece and it was not until June that he set to writing it. The composition went smoothly, however, and the piece was finished before the end of summer.  

But Rachmaninov had not had time to learn the demanding solo part he had composed for himself before his departure for the U.S. He therefore brought a practice keyboard along on the voyage and on this device worked to master the concerto’s intricacies. This unusual practicum proved sufficient. Rachmaninov played the concerto with consistent success throughout his American tour. A notable performance occurred on January 16, 1910, at Carnegie Hall in New York, when the orchestra was led by Gustav Mahler. 

Apart from its obvious virtuosity, the concerto’s musical character derives chiefly from two traits that inform Rachmaninov’s output as a whole: an unabashedly lush and effusive Romanticism; and a certain Russian melancholy. The composer establishes the latter quality at the beginning of the work with a theme given out by the piano as a spare melodic line over minimal orchestral accompaniment. The minor-mode contours of this subject suggest an old Russian song. One musicologist even proposed that it derives from a Russian Orthodox Church chant, though Rachmaninov insisted that it “is borrowed neither from folk song nor from liturgical sources. It simply wrote itself.” Later we hear a second subject, a warmly romantic idea announced by the piano alone, and a third theme that has something of the character of a march. The development of these materials leads to a thunderous climax and a long, extremely demanding cadenza solo. An abbreviated reprise of the initial subject then brings the movement to a quiet conclusion. 

The second movement, which Rachmaninov describes as an “intermezzo,” entails two highly contrasted types of music. Its initial section considers a quiet theme introduced by the strings but worked up by the piano into an almost vehemently impassioned expression. Suddenly, however, the tempo quickens, the texture becomes gossamer, and the music assumes the manner of an animated scherzo. Here the orchestral woodwinds give out a variant of the main theme of the first movement. The finale, which follows without pause, is the concerto’s most spirited movement, and it provides a thrilling display of keyboard virtuosity.  
 
Paul Schiavo © 2017, revised 2025