Alexander Melnikov & Belgian National Orchestra by Prokofiev, -tól (2024/2024), Karmester Stanislav Kochanovsky, Bozar, Brussels, Belgium

A WORK OF STEEL AND IRON Between 1918 and 1936, the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev went into exile and avoided his homeland, the newly-founded Soviet Union. After wandering for several years, mainly in America, he settled in Paris in 1923. There he intensified his contacts with the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. The latter commissioned ballets such as Chout and Le Pas d’acier. In two concerts, the Belgian National Orchestra performs the suites from these ballets, as well as other works from Prokofiev’s American and French periods. The first concert on Friday 2 February begins with Prokofiev’s suite from the ballet Le pas d’acier, a work that depicts Soviet life in a busy railway station and then in a factory. It will be followed by the Second Piano Concerto, performed by Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov. Prokofiev reconstructed this extremely challenging four-movement work in 1923, after the first version from 1913 was lost in the flames of the Russian Revolution. A year later, in Paris, Prokofiev began work on his Second Symphony, “a work of steel and iron”, the undisputed climax of his expressionist period. On Sunday 4 February, the German violinist Veronika Eberle performs the First Violin Concerto, written in the year of the Russian Revolution (1917). Prokofiev defected to the United States and then to Western Europe immediately after completing his composition, and it was not until 1923 that the concerto was premiered in Paris. One of the first violinists to play the work, Joseph Szigeti, described Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto as ‘a mixture of fairy-tale naivety and wild daring’. A suite is also on the programme: Chout, about a jester who deceived seven others.