Patricia Kopatchinskaja / Vladimir Jurowski PROKOFIEV & STRAVINSKY

 

A masked ball. Two figures came up to me. One with a large wig, a long nose, and a black poodle on a leash. The other dark red, with an immense tear glistening in his eye . . .

‘Who are you?’ I ask.
‘We are the souls of the two pieces that you have recorded. We’re slightly related.’

The one with the long nose and the poodle says,

‘I start every movement with a slap. Did you find it amusing to slip inside me? ‘

‘Oh yes,’ I answer, ‘but tell me – how could your master have brought you into the world without those cheeky opening chords? Would you be here at all? And your disguise – is it supposed to be a provocation? Sergey Sergeyevich said it was all just “Bach with smallpox” . . . But, if you don’t mind my saying so, there isn’t much Bach there at all: where are the piety, the deep seriousness? There’s only his wig and his Baroque costume. And, wrapped up in that, pagan energy and sarcastic wit. Did the devil himself instil that in your master during a card game?’ The poodle looked at me suddenly.

The other mask was silent. I nudged him and said: ‘I was the melody of love in you. Did you feel that?’
The mask was silent.
‘I heard the ticking clock of destiny beneath me, but I flew over everything, worried about nothing, because I knew I had become a part of eternity . . .
There was melancholy, resignation . . .’
At the beginning, a dark prophecy. An old Russian woman in the fog . . . Was your master not running away from himself, feeling a fracture deep inside him? Did he not take refuge in a childlike dream world? Does the first move- ment not evoke images from fairy tales old and new, like Chagall? But alongside the human world is another one, inhuman, mechanical, the hum and ticking of machines and clock mecha- nisms. And constant scene changes, as in ballet or films. And in the last movement, the castanets, which to my ears don’t sound so much Spanish as like rattling skeletons. Really it’s all very eerie, a ‘danse macabre’ leading to death by exhaustion!

The mask was silent. (Patricia Kopatchinskaja)

The two violin concertos coupled on this recording display as many affinities as they do divergences. Both stem from creators in conflict with their native Russia – one choosing to return there, the other settling permanently in exile; both belong to the aesthetic of the ‘return to order’ observed from 1920 onwards and characterised by the reappropriation of models from the past. If Prokofiev preserves the traditional bases of the concerto, he combines them with a search for a new lyricism. As for Stravinsky, he reworks tried and trusted models while offering a deliberately neutral, distanced expressivity.