Pianists Martha Argerich and Sergei Babayan have recorded two selections from Prokofiev’s music for stage and screen in magnificent two-piano transcriptions by Babayan. Prokofiev for Two, captures for
posterity the sense of mutual inspiration felt by these kindred spirits,
palpable in their live performances together. The upcoming album
features Babayan’s twelve-movement transcription of numbers from the
ballet Romeo and Juliet and his seven-movement suite transcribed from Prokofiev’s incidental music for Hamlet and Eugene Onegin, film score for The Queen of Spades and opera War and Peace.
Martha
Argerich and Sergei Babayan first met in Brussels in 1991 when, on a
whim, he looked her up in the phonebook and, to his own surprise, found
her name and telephone number listed. His call from a phone box in the
city started a strong friendship that led to numerous joint appearances
in Europe and America. After one performance of Rachmaninov’s “Suite
No.2” and other works for two pianos, Babayan told Argerich of his
dream to transcribe pieces from Romeo and Juliet for
their next duo date. “She was very inspired by the idea,” he recalls.
“It was the greatest pleasure – and an honour – to create something that
we would play together.” Babayan’s take on Prokofiev, coupled with a suite of rarities from the composer’s stage and film music, can be heard in Prokofiev for Two.
The
freshly transcribed Prokofiev score received its premiere performance
as part of the Martha Argerich Project at the 2013 Lugano Festival. Argerich
and Babayan have since performed this work together with the revised
Romeo and Juliet suite several times, most recently in concert at
Stuttgart’s Liederhalle last November.
Martha Argerich is already
renowned for her interpretations of Prokofiev’s music. The
Argentine-born artist, hailed as one of the greatest pianists of all
time, included the composer’s turbulent “Toccata” in her Deutsche
Grammophon recital debut album, recorded in 1960. She reinforced her
international reputation seven years later with a landmark recording for
the yellow label of Prokofiev’s “Third Piano Concerto” with the
Berliner Philharmoniker and Claudio Abbado. “I have loved Prokofiev ever
since I can recall,” notes Argerich. “And people think he loves me too
sometimes! I love the way Sergei [Babayan] plays Prokofiev and many
other things. The first solo recital of his I heard was Bach’s Goldberg Variations and I was incredibly impressed by it. I very much liked his proposal that we should play his transcription of Romeo and Juliet and feel very honoured that he dedicated it to me.”
Babayan’s
love for Prokofiev, like Argerich’s, is deeply rooted, dating back to
his childhood in Armenia and student days at the Moscow Conservatoire.
Having left the USSR for the first time in 1989, he settled in the U.S.
Time and again, Babayan has paid tribute to Prokofiev, playing several
of his piano concertos with Valery Gergiev including at the 2015 BBC
Proms in a monumental concert with the London Symphony Orchestra
featuring all five of the works.
His new Prokofiev
transcriptions are both dedicated to Martha Argerich. “This project
happened because of my love for Prokofiev, my love for Martha and my
love for the ballet Romeo and Juliet,” reflects Babayan. The idea of transcribing
Romeo and Juliet
first arose decades ago while he was studying Prokofiev’s colourful
instrumentation in close detail with an orchestra. Already aware of
Argerich’s playing, he was further inspired after hearing a pirate
recording of her 1981 Carnegie Hall performance of the
“Ten Pieces Op.75” from Romeo and Juliet. “I listened and was immediately
drawn to learn the cycle. But I felt that Prokofiev used chamber-like
numbers for his selection of music for his transcription for solo piano.
If you first became acquainted with the ballet through this piano
score, you would never guess or understand the whole tragic, violent,
and dark nature of the original work. Of course, the ballet contains
lyrical, romantic music; music filled with humour and dance movement.
But it also contains music for the “Death of Tybalt” – music of love and
hate.”
Believing it would be impossible for music of such
powerful emotion to be conveyed by two hands, and aware of Prokofiev’s
own fondness for transcription, Babayan felt driven to exploit the full
expressive force and tonal richness of two pianos. His created version
contains what Martha Argerich, with a wry laugh, calls “difficult and
demanding” technical and musical challenges. Both musicians, however,
agree that transcription is “an act of love” and Babayan’s experience
with Romeo and Juliet soon led him to explore some of the
composer’s lesser-known works and create the second suite on this album.
As he points out, this music will be new to most listeners. For
example, only fragments of the film score for The Queen of Spades
have ever been performed or recorded. He underlines its imaginative and
innovative qualities, adding, “I’m sure if Prokofiev had lived longer
he would have used the material for The Queen of Spades for a new movie, symphony, quartet or maybe even a piano duo. This music stayed on the shelf and it was my luck to hear it.”
Prokofiev for Two
is driven by the passion and power of an ideal keyboard partnership.
Martha Argerich considers playing in duo with Babayan to be “a thing of
alchemy – a discovery”. For his part, Babayan says the experience of
performing with Argerich is like joining a conversation with a divine
being, one in which “you cannot be mundane or ordinary … Martha will
somehow pull out the best from you.”
There's undoubtedly an enormous amount of sensitivity and experience in
the Schumann . . . [in the Debussy] you can hear two great pianists at
work . . . There's a wide range of tone colour, and the flexibility of
tempo is mostly coherent, bringing out the tragedy of the central
movement, as well as the virtuoso outpouring of the first, and the wit
and fleetness of foot in the third . . . [in the Bartók] Barenboim and
Argerich are clearly in the swing of all the complex rhythms, and the
first movement is very exciting. (Martin Cotton / BBC Music Magazine)
