Prokofiev was twenty-one when he wrote the Sarcasmes, op. 17, and already contemptuous of anyone who expected him to behave. That contempt — gleeful, almost theatrical — is what Roger Woodward seems to relish most about this collection of piano works spanning three decades, and on the whole his relish is well-founded.
The Sarcasmes are nasty pieces of work, and I mean that as a compliment. Prokofiev pounds the instrument not from ignorance but from calculation — he was, after all, a formidable pianist who premiered most of his own early music, and he knew exactly how much abuse the Steinway could absorb before it started sounding merely brutal rather than brilliantly vicious. Woodward understands this distinction. The percussive attacks land with precision, not with the blunt force of someone simply trying to make an impression. There is wit underneath the aggression. There almost always is with Prokofiev.
Then comes the Prelude, op. 12, no. 7 — and everything changes. Dreamlike, hovering, genuinely lovely. Prokofiev could write music of extraordinary delicacy when he chose to, and he chose to here, sandwiching this little oasis between two storms as if daring the listener to miss the joke.
The Suggestion diabolique, op. 4, no. 4, deserves every syllable of its name. It has that quality — common to Prokofiev’s early work — of sounding like it was composed by someone who found human discomfort faintly amusing. The Four Etudes, op. 2, predate the Sarcasmes by a few years and in some ways they are even rawer: the first of them especially has a kind of relentless, lurching menace, all displaced accents and grinding parallel motion. Prokofiev was nineteen. He had not yet learned to be diplomatic, and he never really tried.
Musiques d’enfants, op. 65, offers one of those Prokofiev pivots that can stop you short — music written for children, in 1935, with a clarity and directness that almost masks how carefully it is made. The Paris years were behind him; he had returned to the Soviet Union, and whatever pressures that brought, it also brought a renewed interest in accessibility. He completed Peter and the Wolf the same year, reportedly in a week, then spent another week on the orchestration. Even accounting for the exaggerations that gather around legendary composers, the speed is extraordinary.
The Pensées, op. 62 — composed in 1933 and 1934 — are the most underplayed works on this disc, and perhaps the most interesting. They are introspective in a way that Prokofiev rarely advertised; the reflective mode didn’t fit his public image and he seems to have known it. Woodward brings genuine care to them, resisting the temptation to push too hard, letting the longer final piece — nearly seven minutes — breathe at its own pace. The Paysage, op. 59, no. 2, has a similar quality: not quite nocturnal, not quite pastoral, occupying some intermediate emotional territory that Prokofiev navigated with more sureness than he is usually credited for.
The Visions Fugitives, op. 22, which closes the disc, is the inevitable touchstone. Twenty short pieces, composed between 1915 and 1917 — years, it is worth remembering, of world war and then revolution, though Prokofiev always claimed to have been largely indifferent to both. The range of expression is remarkable: from the barely audible to the violently assertive, from the sardonic to the genuinely tender. Sviatoslav Richter’s 1958 disc remains the standard against which all others are measured, and Woodward does not displace it. But he makes a serious case, particularly in the softer, stranger pieces where he finds colors that are his own.
This is a useful and often persuasive recital. Woodward’s Prokofiev is angular, uncompromising, occasionally a little willful — qualities that suit the early iconoclast better than the later Soviet stylist. But the range of the program argues that Prokofiev was never simply one thing, and that argument Woodward wins.
