Prokofiev Piano Works – Roger Woodward

Roger Woodward has always been an odd duck among pianists, and I mean that as the highest compliment. His discography wanders where fashion doesn’t lead — Sorabji, Cage, Xenakis, then back to Bach as though nothing peculiar had happened at all. This 1991 Prokofiev collection, made for the composer’s centenary and only now getting its due circulation, belongs to that wandering. It should not be filed away as a curiosity. It’s one of the more searching accounts of this repertoire I’ve encountered on disc, and I’ve heard a good many.

The pianist’s own notes — expanded from his memoir Beyond Black and White — tell us he heard Richter play this music in Warsaw, and that he knew Lina Prokofieva personally. That’s not incidental color. It explains something about the sound he makes, which has almost nothing to do with the glossy athleticism you get from pianists who treat the composer as a virtuoso vehicle and little else. Woodward quotes Lina and Richter both on Prokofiev’s contempt for “nuanced piano playing,” a startling claim from a man capable of the most refined writing in twentieth-century music. But there’s truth buried in the provocation. Prokofiev wanted directness. He wanted the hammer to sound like a hammer.

You hear that conviction from the first bars of the Sarcasms, op. 17, five pieces that still sound shockingly modern eight decades on, closer to Bartók’s barbarism than to anything in the Rachmaninoff-scented Russian tradition that raised Prokofiev. The third piece, marked Allegro precipitato, comes at you like Mossolov’s Iron Foundry translated for ten fingers: block chords driven downward with an almost punitive insistence, and Woodward doesn’t flinch from the ugliness of it. Good. Too many pianists sand down these corners, worried the audience might think them brutal rather than brilliant. Woodward isn’t worried. The central episode opens a window of odd, glassy lyricism, and here the release feels genuinely won, not merely programmed in.

Compare Boris Berman’s account on Chandos, part of his old complete survey: a fine, well-schooled reading, lucid textures, sensible tempos. Sensible is the problem. Woodward sounds like he’s being chased by something. Berman sounds like he’s got the score memorized and respects it. There’s a difference.

The Four Etudes, op. 2, an early calling card written when the composer was still a scandalous teenager at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, come off here with real ferocity. The fourth, in C minor, has the kind of pounding perpetual motion that makes you understand why his classmates thought him a barbarian at the piano. Elsewhere the disc turns tender almost to the point of shyness. The two miniatures from Musiques d’enfants, op. 65, a set better known in its orchestral guise as the Summer Day suite, are dispatched with an unforced simplicity, no cuteness, no italicized charm. The Gavotta from op. 32 has that particular Prokofiev irony, poised somewhere between Haydn and vaudeville, and Woodward doesn’t oversell the joke.

Pensées, op. 62, gets underplayed by nearly everybody: three brief, harmonically restless pieces from Prokofiev’s dry years abroad, written when commissions were thin and his Parisian reputation had gone strangely quiet. Woodward gives them thirteen and a half minutes of genuine attention, treating them less as filler than as private confession. I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone make so persuasive a case for their inclusion in the canon.

And then, at the close, the Visions Fugitives, op. 22: twenty pieces, barely any of them longer than a minute, and among the most perfect things Prokofiev ever wrote for solo piano. Richter championed them; so did Sviatoslav Neuhaus. Woodward’s reading has the fingerprints of that lineage all over it: quick wit, sudden violence, then an almost unbearable stillness, sometimes within the same sixty seconds. No. 9, marked Allegretto tranquillo, floats by like something half-remembered. No. 14 snaps like a whip. The whole sequence adds up to something closer to a Chekhov story cycle than a set of piano pieces: glancing, incomplete, devastating in aggregate.

The engineering, dating from 1991, has some analogue warmth to it, not audiophile-crisp, but it suits the music’s grain rather than sanitizing it. I’d have liked a shade more air around the bass register in the Sarcasms, honestly, but that’s a quibble, not a complaint.

This is not a disc for those who want their Prokofiev safe, evenly lit, and appropriately respectful of the composer’s later Soviet respectability. It’s a disc for those who remember, or want to be reminded, that he was once considered the enfant terrible of Russian music, capable of frightening his own teachers. Woodward remembers. Strongly recommended, and worth seeking out even for listeners who think they already own all the Prokofiev they need.