The latest selection of The Gaggle Music Club is Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26. Prokofiev composed this work—one of his most popular with concertgoers—during a particularly unsettled period of his life: the decade spanning World War I, the Russian Revolution and his first years of living as an émigré.

Born in 1891 on an estate in what is now Ukraine, Prokofiev entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory at the age of 13. His teachers admired his technical brilliance but found his music abrasive and deliberately provocative. His First Piano Concerto, composed in 1912, scandalized some audiences with its aggressive energy and uncompromising modernism. His Second Concerto, composed a year later, elicited an even more negative response.

By 1913–14, however, Prokofiev was beginning to look beyond sheer virtuosity. Though a brilliant pianist who astonished audiences with his dazzling technique and rhythmic precision, he wanted to be accepted as a serious composer. He sought to combine sharp modern rhythms with lyricism, wit and classical balance. He accomplished this in the Third Concerto.

The earliest material for the concerto dates from around 1913. Prokofiev kept notebooks filled with sketches, melodic fragments and harmonic ideas. Preserving musical ideas rather than putting them to immediate use became one of his characteristic working methods. Rather than compose works continuously from start to finish, he tended to accumulate material until he found the right structure into which he could fit it.

An important intermediate stage toward the composition of the Third Piano Concerto was a projected work called the White Piano Concerto. Prokofiev had envisaged composing a concerto in which the piano would participate almost continuously without the traditional orchestral tuttis (passages in which the full orchestra plays together) that characterized 19th century concertos. The idea ultimately proved impractical, and Prokofiev abandoned the project. Nevertheless, several musical ideas that Prokofiev originally intended to use in the White Concerto eventually found their way into the Third Piano Concerto.

The outbreak of the World War I interrupted many of Prokofiev’s artistic plans. The 1917 Russian Revolution overturned the political and cultural world in which Prokofiev had grown up. Unlike some later Soviet composers, Prokofiev did not immediately commit himself either to the Bolshevik regime or to permanent exile. Instead, he sought official permission to leave Russia, arguing that he wished to continue his career abroad. In 1918 the Soviet authorities, surprisingly, granted him permission, and he departed for the United States by way of Japan.

Prokofiev had not completed the concerto before his departure, and carried it with him in the form of sketches and ideas.

No immediate triumph awaited him in America. Although his performances as a pianist attracted attention, audiences were less receptive to his musical compositions.

By 1920 Prokofiev had moved to France, settling for a time near Paris, which had become the principal center of Russian émigré artistic life. There he encountered figures such as Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev and the cosmopolitan artistic circles surrounding the Ballets Russes. These encounters influenced him profoundly. Parisian appetite for wit and elegance encouraged Prokofiev to temper the uncompromising aggressiveness of his early compositions.

The earliest surviving material for the Third Concerto goes back to 1913. In that year Prokofiev sketched out what eventually would become the theme of the second movement. Then, in 1916, he composed two variations on that theme. Thus, by 1916, he already had the basic theme-and-variations idea, but he did not yet have the finished concerto.

Then, when Prokofiev finally assembled the Third Concerto in 1917–21, he took this existing material and expanded it into the complete second movement: theme + variations + coda.

It was during the summer of 1921, while he was staying in the Breton village of Saint-Brévin-les-Pins, that Prokofiev finally assembled the disparate materials into the concerto that we know today. The timing is revealing. He had already composed major works such as the opera The Love for Three Oranges, yet he remained eager to establish himself internationally as both composer and virtuoso pianist. A new concerto would serve both purposes simultaneously.

Prokofiev’s third piano concerto differs markedly from his previous works. The opening clarinet melody, simple and almost pastoral, serves as an unlikely prelude for the dazzling piano entrance that follows. Throughout the work Prokofiev alternates passages of astonishing brilliance with moments of extraordinary lyricism.

The finale perhaps best illustrates what makes the concerto unique. It contains the percussive keyboard writing that was characteristic of the young Prokofiev, yet it is integrated into a structure of remarkable coherence. Rather than overwhelm the orchestra, the piano engages in continuous dialogue with it. The concerto is a brilliantly conceived conversation between soloist and orchestra.

The Third Piano Concerto premiered on Dec. 16, 1921, in Chicago. Prokofiev himself was the soloist, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Frederick Stock. The reception was favorable, though scarcely ecstatic. U.S. critics admired the composer’s creativity with the piano but remained divided over the music itself. Some heard only harsh modernism; others recognized a true originality.

Over time, however, the concerto acquired a reputation surpassing that of any of Prokofiev's other piano concertos. Pianists have come to regard the work as embodying a perfect balance between technical brilliance and musical seriousness. Playing the piano concerto demands immense dexterity—rapid repeated notes, huge leaps and intricate rhythms—but never for its own sake. Every technical challenge serves a musical purpose.

Perhaps the deepest significance of the concerto lies in its position within Prokofiev's artistic development. It marks the moment when he ceased to be merely the brilliant enfant terrible of Russian modernism and became a mature composer capable of reconciling modernist energy with classical proportion, wit and lyrical beauty.

The concerto's long gestation, stretching from the years before World War I through the Russian Revolution, exile and artistic reinvention, is discernible in its extraordinary synthesis of youthful audacity and mature craftsmanship.

It is, in many respects, the work in which Prokofiev discovered his own distinctive voice—a voice that would later produce masterpieces such as the ballets Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, the Fifth Symphony and the late piano sonatas. For that reason, the Third Piano Concerto is not merely his most frequently performed concerto; it is the work that most perfectly captures the complex, brilliant and often paradoxical character of his musical personality.

In this performance of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No.3 from Feb. 1, 2020, Martha Argerich is soloist and Darío Alejandro Ntaca conducts the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.