Piano Concerto No. 2 (Prokofiev) - Premiere and Reception

Premiere and Reception

The work is dedicated to the memory of Maximilian Schmidthof, a friend of Prokofiev's at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, who had committed suicide in April 1913 after having written a farewell letter to Prokofiev. Prokofiev premiered the work that same year, performing the solo piano part, on August 23 at Pavlovsk. Most of the audience reacted intensely. The concerto's wild temperament left a positive impression on some of the listeners, whereas others were opposed to the jarring and modernistic sound ("To hell with this futurist music!"/ "What is he doing, making fun of us?"/ "The cats on the roof make better music!").

When the original orchestral score was destroyed in a fire following the Russian Revolution, Prokofiev reconstructed and considerably revised the concerto in 1923; in the process, he made the concerto, in his own words, "less foursquare" and "slightly more complex in its contrapuntal fabric". The finished result, Prokofiev felt, was "so completely rewritten that it might almost be considered No. 4". (The Third Concerto had premiered in 1921). He premiered this revised version of the concerto in Paris on May 8, 1924 with Serge Koussevitzky conducting.

It remains one of the most technically formidable piano concertos in the standard repertoire. Prokofiev biographer, David Nice, noted in 2011: "A decade ago I’d have bet you there were only a dozen pianists in the world who could play Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto properly. Argerich wouldn’t touch it, Kissin delayed learning it, and even Prokofiev as virtuoso had got into a terrible mess trying to perform it with Ansermet and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s, when it had gone out of his fingers."