Looking at this sprawling set—five discs, twenty-seven works, some three hundred and fifty minutes of music—one faces certain questions before the first note sounds. Is completism a virtue? Does any single pianist command all the idioms Prokofiev demands?
And what exactly has Danacord given us here, beyond the considerable heft? Not quite everything, as it happens. The transcriptions are absent—those three sets from Cinderella, the Buxtehude arrangement.
Lev Vinocour recorded those for Arte Nova, and quite well. More troubling: the juvenilia remain unexcavated, and — well — even some mature pieces have slipped through. The "Scherzo" in A minor of 1912 exists only as a catalog ghost.
So “complete” proves elastic. But let’s grant Marshev his achievement. Born in Baku in 1961, trained at the Gnesin School and Moscow Conservatoire under Mikhail Voskresensky, he represents—as; his admirers like to note—the fifth generation of Russian pianism since Liszt, through Siloti, Igumnov, and Lev Oborin.
That’s pedigree. Whether it translates to authority across Prokofiev’s entire keyboard output… well, that’s the question these discs must answer.
The early works reveal a composer still finding his voice, though not without interest. The Song Without Words (circa 1905), receiving its first album here, sounds remote from what we think of as Prokofievian—tender, slightly Schumannesque, the kind of conservatory exercise that might have earned a pat on the head from Liadov. The Two Pieces for Children from 1904-5 are similarly slight.
Marshev plays them with appropriate simplicity, resisting any temptation to inflate their modest charms. The First Sonata in F minor — Op. 1, written at nineteen, shows Prokofiev already technically formidable but still working within late-Romantic conventions.
Boris Asafyev heard “scarcely imperceptible details” that announced the new, and — well — he wasn’t wrong—but this is fundamentally a work that could have been written by a talented student of Glazunov. Marshev gives it full-blooded commitment, perhaps more than the music strictly requires. His tone in the opening "Allegro" has that characteristic Russian weight, dense and dark, though I wonder if a lighter touch might have served the music’s essential modesty.
The Four Études, Op. 2, are something else again. Here we encounter the virtuoso pianist-composer flexing his considerable muscles—octaves, chromatic figurations, double notes, all the tricks.
Still fin-de-siècle in their romantic ardor, but with hints of what’s coming: polyrhythmic passages; in the first, unsettling key changes in the second, genuine strangeness in the third. Marshev plays them with the technical command they demand, though in the fourth étude—marked Presto energico—I detected a slight scramble in the final pages. These are fiendishly difficult pieces; perfection may be too much to ask.
The miniature collections—Opp. 3, 4, and 12—show Prokofiev developing his characteristic voice through what started as student “ditties.” The Four Pieces, Op. 4, are particularly striking, especially “Suggestion diabolique,” which announces the composer’s lifelong fascination with the grotesque and demonic.
Marshev understands this music’s essential duality: it’s both salon music and something darker, more disturbing. His “Despair” from Op. 4 genuinely sounds despairing, not merely melancholic.
The Toccata, Op. 11, remains one of Prokofiev’s most stunning early achievements—a perpetuum mobile derived from absurdly simple material, all motor rhythm and percussive drive. Marshev attacks it with appropriate ferocity, though I found myself wishing for slightly more clarity in the chromatic contrary-motion passages.
The piece shouldn’t merely sound difficult; it should sound dangerous. Miaskovsky called it “devilishly clever, biting, energetic”—all true, but Marshev’s reading emphasizes energy over bite. The Second Sonata in D minor, Op.
14, marks Prokofiev’s full maturity as a keyboard composer. Four movements, genuine contrasts, a perfect balance between romantic impulse and modernist exploration. The opening movement’s two themes—one bustling and aggressive, one quiet and pensive—establish a dialectic Prokofiev would explore throughout his career.
Marshev plays the "Allegro" ma non troppo with conviction — though his tempo in the development section struck me as slightly rushed. The slow movement, dark and chromatic, receives a properly tragic reading, all browns and golds, autumnal and foreboding. The Sarcasms, Op.
17, present a different challenge. These five pieces represent Prokofiev at his most deliberately provocative, seeking a new musical language beyond late-Romanticism’s exhausted conventions. “Sometimes we laugh maliciously,” Gogol wrote, and Prokofiev took the hint.
These are caustic, penetrating expressions of life’s darker forces—or so Asafyev believed. Marshev plays them with appropriate aggression, though I wonder if he fully captures their sardonic wit. The third piece, with its bitonal writing (F-sharp minor against B-flat minor), should sound more acidly humorous, less merely violent.
But then we reach the Visions fugitives, Op. 22, and everything clicks into place. These twenty miniatures, composed between 1915 and 1917, represent Prokofiev in his most experimental, most protean mode.
Konstantin Balmont’s epigraph speaks of “worlds full of the changing play of rainbow hues,” and the music delivers precisely that—an astonishing range of moods, techniques, and emotional states compressed into fragments lasting between twenty-one seconds and two-and-a-half minutes. Marshev understands that these pieces must be heard as a cycle, not excerpted. He maintains the internal balance Prokofiev carefully constructed, contrasting lyrical numbers with dramatic and ferocious ones, building toward the concluding Lento with a sense of inevitable rightness.
This is some of the finest playing on these discs—sensitive, varied, technically impeccable. The fourteenth vision, marked Feroce, genuinely sounds ferocious; the fifteenth, Inquieto, captures that peculiar Prokofiev restlessness; and the final Lento achieves a benedictory
