Steve Schwartz:

>Summary for the Busy Executive: Stronger than steel.
>
>I tend to forget Prokofiev as one of the great pianists...  According
>to contemporary accounts and reviews, Prokofiev's piano technique -
>formidable to the point of intimidating - came over as hard and glittering.

That's the way I like to hear him performed--and rarely do.  Too
many performances of his piano music strike me as mushy.  Not Richter's.
Would that there were more well-recorded performances by him.  I like
Bronfman also.  Probably best not to mention the ones I dislike.

>Prokofiev's stock has declined as Shostakovich's has risen.  In
>recent years, one notes a tendency among writers to patronize him as a
>shallow, though musical petite maitre, a psychological lightweight.

Stravinsky tended to look down on him too, as I understand.  But
Prokofiev had a tremendous stylistic range, a distinctive voice, melodic
and rhythmic inventiveness, and his tonality, if fairly traditional, was
yet fresh and pungent.  I consider him one of the best composers of the
last century.

>The seventh [sonata] - the most widely-played -is the most direct, the
>most efficient, saying the most in as few notes as possible.  It's also
>the starkest and most aggressively Modern of the three.  The first
>movement is as tonally untethered as Prokofiev ever got, but the rhythms
>are strong to the point of brutality....  [The] last movement [of] the
>seventh...  though undoubtedly powerful - always smacks to me of agitprop
>and bravado, possibly because Prokofiev attacks the material so
>single-mindedly.

Not sure why you want to say that about the finale, Steve.  It's opening
strikes me as jazzy, not a quality I'd think of as agitprop.

Jim Tobin