RECORDING REVIEW: Sergei Prokofiev — Miniatures (Brian Woods, piano; Navona Records NV6870)

SERGEI SERGEYEVICH PROKOFIEV (1891 – 1953): Miniatures – Works for Solo Piano, Opp. 22, 31, 17, and 4 — Brian Woods, piano [Recorded in Arianna String Quartet Recital Hall, University of Missouri at St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, 12 – 15 January 2026; Navona Records NV6870, 49:28; Available from major music retailers and streaming services via Navona Records]

Contemplating his achievements as both composer and global citizen and the gravity of creators’ responsibilities to Art, self, and humanity, Sergei Prokofiev asserted in 1951 that a composer’s foremost charges are to ‘beautify human life and defend it.’ Aspects of this belief lurk within the plot of Prokofiev’s Soviet opera Semyon Kotko, in which a ‘son of working people’ seeks to expose corruption and disloyalty and allow true love to prevail. This is perhaps typically operatic in its singleminded naïveté, but it exemplifies Prokofiev’s conviction that artists can and must strive to combat the wrongs of their societies. In a body of work encompassing many genres and forms, Prokofiev’s music for solo piano spans the entirety of his career, from juvenile works to the remarkable Sonatas of his final years, paralleling the composer’s musical and philosophical maturation. The handful of piano works with extant programmatic associations exhibit a conscious aspiration to spur action by inspiring reaction, the composer instigating social progress by providing it with new sounds and rhythms.

With Miniatures, expertly produced and engineered for Navona Records by Nathan Hershey, pianist Brian Woods journeys through an assortment of some of Prokofiev’s most experimental works for solo piano, none of them longer than four minutes in duration. Listeners who heard Woods’s previous Navona release Wanderings, a superbly-played recital of works by Chopin, Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger, and Amy Beach, are acquainted with the impeccably-honed technique and interpretive discernment that are cornerstones of his pianism, but even the briefest of Prokofiev’s works for piano present formidable challenges to very gifted pianists. Woods’s playing of these ‘miniatures’ demonstrates comprehension not only of their singular musical accents but also of Prokofiev’s mandate that artists should devote their work to defying barriers and boundaries.

Products of a fertile compositional period in the second decade of the Twentieth Century, a time during which the composer was also preparing ballet scores, an array of songs, and his First Symphony, the twenty-episode Visions fugitives of Prokofiev’s Opus 22 constitute an intelligently-curated survey of common and emerging styles of contemporary composition, incorporating elements of Russian traditions with the innovations heard in music by French composers including Erik Satie and Claude Debussy. Lauded even before their public premiere as a noteworthy advancement of Prokofiev’s unique musical idiom, the Visions ally dissonance prefiguring the Second Viennese School with adherence to conventional tonalities and rhythmic figurations, albeit unconventionally employed. Nearly twenty years after giving the first performance of Visions fugitives as part of a 1918 recital in today’s Saint Petersburg, Prokofiev recorded a sampling of the pieces in Paris. These recordings remain a benchmark, but Woods’s playing of the Visions on this recording reveals that he embraced the lessons offered by the composer in his preserved performances but was not tempted to emulate Prokofiev’s approach.

Traversing all twenty of the Visions requiring only twenty-five minutes affirms that these are indeed fleeting works, the most concise of which lasts only a half-minute, yet there is remarkable cohesiveness in the progression of disparate rhythms, tempi, and colors that characterize Visions. From the equivocal, enigmatic first bars of the opening Lentamente, Woods’s playing of Visions fugitives shares the interpretive flexibility and technical prowess with which Walter Gieseking played the music of Debussy. The halting, almost harsh intervals and harmonic stridency of the following Andante is realized with unflagging energy. The subsequent Allegretto resembles a bel canto scene on a diminutive scale, the bristly central section delivered with theatrical intensity. Woods’s management of the alternations of staccati and cantilena in the Animato is deft, as is his delineation of the contrasting joviality, terpsichorean crispness, and gossamer buoyancy in the Molto giocoso, Con eleganza, and Pittoresco, the last of which is phrased with lightness that honors the movement’s popular incarnation for harp.

Arguably the least-radical of the Visions, the Commodo is nevertheless tinged with Modernist shades that glisten in Woods’s performance, and the Allegro tranquillo’s mercurial melodic shifts between the hands are cleverly integrated into a seamless flow. Woods limns first the jocular irony in the aptly-titled Ridicolosamente and then the discordant ambivalence of the Con vivacità with striking specificity. The darkness that pervades the Assai moderato is disquieting but never threatens to become lugubrious. The Allegretto and the toccata-esque Feroce are played with a level of skill that belies the demands of the music, but the power with which the near-cyclonic thrust of the Inquieto is conveyed is still more arresting. Riveting, too, is the somber dignity disclosed in the six repetitions of a funereal bass figuration in the Dolente.

The Poetico movement is unique among the Visions in being built upon a melodic line assigned to the bass, and Woods misses none of the significance of its haunting quality, wholly avoiding histrionic excess. The pianist vividly communicates a dulcet gentleness that, despite Prokofiev’s description, can all too easily be overlooked amidst the listlessness of the Con una dolce lentezza. The triadic writing that permeates the Presto agitatissimo e molto accentuato receives from Woods a performance of unaffected intensity, his concentration on the accuracy of note values unmistakable—and invaluable. The most expansive of the Visions, the valedictory Lento irrealmente, is characterized by a piquant theme, deployed in this performance with refreshing restraint. In approximately the time required to play a single movement of many of the great Romantic sonatas, Woods and Prokofiev summarize virtually the entire history of composition for the piano prior to 1920 and foretell much of what has followed, from Britten and Finnissy to Adams and Adès.

The Opus 31 «Сказки старой бабушки» (Tales of an Old Grandmother) were composed after Prokofiev emigrated to New York, following the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and are suffused with a refugee’s sadness and yearning for distant places. Each of the work’s four movements is centered in a minor key, the first in D minor, the base key of many Requiem settings. The moods of Opus 31 could hardly be more different than those of the far larger and long-delayed work that dominated Prokofiev’s artistic resources during the writing of the Tales, the farcical opera L’amour pour trois oranges. More than a mere escape from the stress caused by work on the opera, Opus 31 provided the displaced artist with an outlet for lamenting the loss of innocence, symbolized by a child’s interaction with a grandmother ostensibly nearing the end of her life. Hypothesizing about subtexts in generations-old works of art is often ill-advised and almost always unnecessary, but it is not difficult to imagine Prokofiev reflecting through Opus 31 on conversations with elders from his own boyhood.

In this recorded performance, Woods shapes the Tales with attention to musical architecture and thematic interplay, imparting the music’s wistful narratives. An aura of Classicism pervades the opening Moderato, the arpeggi recalling the Alberti bass often used in the Eighteenth Century in a nod to both youths’ and pianists’ formative experiences. This is still unmistakably Twentieth-Century music, but Woods plays it with the sort of apt poise with which he might deliver the slow movement of a Haydn sonata. The F♯-minor Andantino is closely related to the rhapsodic moments in Visions fugitives and is executed with meditative eloquence. The vein of implacability that flows beneath the skin of the E-minor Andante assai is tapped by Woods with surgical precision, but here, too, melancholy emerges from the music’s angst. The final movement, an ambiguous Sostenuto in B minor, is marked by the uncertainty of competing solemnity and agitation. Woods excels at elucidating the subtleties of the music without distorting its carefully-wrought structures, his technical mastery facilitating evocations of song-like simplicity in even the most thorny passages.

Also dating from the 1910s, the Opus 17 «Сарказмы» (Sarcasms) were more controversial when new than much of Prokofiev’s piano music. Not unlike Mozart’s Musikalischer Spaß, the five movements of Sarcasms utilize rhythmic anomalies and intentional ‘wrong’ notes to challenge performers’ and listeners’ expectations. The quicksilver transformations of spirit between the Tempestoso and Allegro rubato Sarcasms are effected with appreciable focus on thematic development. Extending its kinship with Mozart’s Musikalischer Spaß, the Allegro precipitato is notable for its use of polytonality, with simultaneous lines for the right and left hands written in different keys. As Richard Strauss did in Die Frau ohne Schatten, Prokofiev achieves emotional depth with deviations from diatonic models. Woods emphasizes the relationship between tonal duality and Sarcasms’ bipartite framework. The latent restlessness of the Smanioso crackles through the pianist’s fingers, and the transition from Precipitosissimo to Andantino in the closing movement is rendered with dramatic impetus similar to Clara Haskil’s navigations of changes of tempo in her celebrated recording of Chopin’s F-minor Piano Concerto.

Woods ends this exploration of Prokofiev’s ‘miniatures’ not with the widely-known fourth of the Opus 4 Four Pieces for piano but with the less-familiar opening piece, the Tranquillo «Воспоминания» (‘Reminiscences’). A sensitive, deceptively unassuming piece in F major, it is perceptibly the work of a young artist—a prototype of the child of Opus 31, perhaps. His account of the work’s Penseroso theme is a fitting illustration of Woods’s playing of all of the music in this collection. Their brevity notwithstanding, these are not pieces that can be played successfully without thorough study, but Woods’s is the kind of meticulously-rehearsed readiness that permits expressive spontaneity. Is there any more meaningful, memorable way to beautify human life?

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Catherine Pisaroni demonstrates in directorial début that not all stagings of Mozart’s Così fan tutte are ‘like that’ (Teatro Grattacielo, New York City; 19 July 2026)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791): Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti, K. 588 — Yi Liu (Fiordiligi), Ashlyn Taylor King (Dorabella), Hayden Smith (Ferrando), Young-Kwang Yoo (Guglielmo), Ziliang Hao (Don Alfonso), Stella Christine (Despina), Catherine Pisaroni (Cupid); Teatro Grattacielo Orchestra; Abdiel Vázquez, conductor [Catherine Pisaroni, director; Teatro Grattacielo, Ellen Stewart Theatre, Shares at La MaMa, New York City, USA; Sunday, 19 July 2026]

Opera companies face a Mozart problem—or, rather, a host of Mozart problems. The operatic masterworks of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s compositional maturity—Idomeneo, re di Creta, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, La clemenza di Tito, and, above all, Die Zauberflöte and his trio of collaborations with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte—are enduringly popular with audiences, yet their logistical challenges are daunting. For all their brilliance, these pieces are not suited to the gargantuan spaces of the largest houses, but smaller companies sometimes lack the resources needed to stage them imaginatively and cast them effectively. Perhaps the greatest marvel of any of Mozart’s post-1780 operas is its ability to delight and move despite musical and dramaturgical adversities. These are operas with plot devices deemed by Nineteenth-Century observers to require editorial correction and thought in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries to demand infusions of ‘relevance.’ Might it not be argued, however, that a work like Così fan tutte—an exquisitely beautiful telling of an outrageously indelicate, even immoral story—succeeds because of its problems, because, under the most thoughtful circumstances, directors, conductors, and singers are compelled to explore beyond prettiness and politeness and thereby to ask audiences to confront their own pettiness and prejudices?

Staging Così fan tutte in the intimate space of the Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa, Teatro Grattacielo provided first-time stage director Catherine Pisaroni with precisely the thoughtful circumstances in which to discard tired traditions in order to look deeply into the psychological motivations of the characters created by Mozart and da Ponte and the external forces that manipulate them. Few artists are more immersed in the genre than Pisaroni, but her extensive exposure to all aspects of preparing and performing opera yielded not a clever adaptation of conventional approaches to staging Così but a thorough, unmistakably affectionate dismantling, analysis, and reconstruction of the pitfall-laden drama. Framing the opera as a treatise on ever-evolving, ever-devolving notions of gender, sexuality, and romantic attachments, supervised and narrated with bemused and confounded aloofness—though, owing to the amplification system, not always with audibility—by an unambiguously feminine Cupid, Pisaroni employed simplicity as her most powerful tool in examining the work’s amorous intrigues. As wily as in any production, Despina was here a meddling roommate of Fiordiligi and Dorabella, lending her advice to the ladies greater impact than an impertinent servant’s counsel might wield. Everyone was young and fanciful: even Don Alfonso, though charismatically cunning, was savvy more through experience of the world than time in it. Aptly for a production coinciding with the FIFA World Cup, Ferrando and Guglielmo were boys-next-door standout athletes, ostensibly called up to the major league to facilitate their ‘return’ as stereotypical bad boys.

Utilizing a minimalist setting in which particular emphasis was devoted to differentiating the characters’ individual physical spaces, the sleekness of the concept perpetuated by uncomplicated costume designs, Pisaroni wholly eschewed reliance upon ‘Kleider machen Leute’ characterization, instead encouraging singers and listeners to seek the characters’ emotions and rationales in music and text. Cuts were numerous, including all choral numbers, and sometimes disfiguring, perhaps most regrettably so when Ferrando’s and Guglielmo’s sublime ‘Secondate, aurette amiche’ was interrupted for an intrusion of a modern club vibe, but Ferrando’s too-often-excised ‘Tradito, schernito’ was retained. In the opera’s final minutes, with Cupid’s machinations hurtling towards disaster, Don Alfonso and Despina were transformed into Mozart and da Ponte and tasked with setting things right, only to suggest that there are no right answers to Così’s questions. In affairs of the heart, it was theorized, no outcome is any more right or less wrong than any other. Ferrando therefore claimed the hands of Fiordiligi and Dorabella, Despina connected with Guglielmo, and Don Alfonso turned his attention to a handsome stagehand. It was a plausible resolutuon for an opera with no wholly-logical conclusions; and, most importantly, one achieved with humor and humanity. In her inaugural outing as a director, Pisaroni excelled both at asking herself and her audience why much of Così is uncomfortable and at refusing to attempt to ‘fix’ any of Mozart’s and da Ponte’s perfect imperfections.

Pisaroni had in conductor Abdiel Vázquez an ideal partner for bringing this unique realization of Così to fruition. From the spirited Overture to the valedictory chord of Act Two, the eleven musicians under his baton played with such joy and involvement that infrequent intonational insecurities and moments of disjointed ensemble were unobtrusive. The conductor’s tempi, discernibly rooted in adherence to Mozart’s instructions and familiarity with Eighteenth-Century practice, allowed the singers to breathe air into their much-tested lungs and life into the characters they portrayed. Vázquez’s playing of the continuo was one of the performance’s foremost glories, his virtuosity giving the keyboard an engaging voice in recitatives. The interpolation of the ominous sounds that announce the arrival of the spectral Commendatore in the penultimate scene of Don Giovanni was enthralling, but most inspired was the—admittedly anachronistic—inclusion of the haunting melody of ‘Lacrimosa’ from the Requiem, played with heartrending delicacy. A plethora of advancements in comprehension and execution of period-appropriate style notwithstanding, a half-century of historically-informed handling of Eighteenth-Century music has largely eroded the sort of organic pacing of Mozart’s operas cultivated in earlier generations by conductors such as Josef Krips and Karl Böhm. Vázquez’s conducting of Teatro Grattacielo’s Così fan tutte lacked none of the scholarly accomplishment of recent decades but also exhibited a now-rare fluency in Mozart’s singular musical language.

I festeggiamenti prematuri: (from left to right) tenor Hayden Smith as Ferrando, bass-baritone Ziliang Hao as Don Alfonso, soprano Stella Christine as Despina, and baritone Young-Kwang Yoo as Guglielmo in Teatro Grattacielo’s performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Così fan tutte, 19 July 2026
[Photograph © by Wesley Sherow and Teatro Grattacielo]

Vivid of personality but wan of voice in Despina’s interactions with Fiordiligi, Dorabella, and Don Alfonso in Act One, soprano Stella Christine found her vocal footing during the interval and launched Act Two with an incisive, artfully-sung account of ‘Una donna a quindici anni.’ As the romantic entanglements careened from playful subterfuge to life-altering betrayal, Christine limned the metamorphosis of Despina’s ennui into apprehensiveness with immediacy and increasing musical comfort. With each successive ensemble, she seized opportunities to distinguish Despina from her female counterparts with greater confidence. The voice’s focus blossomed as the line ascended, bringing Despina musically and theatrically to the core of the opera’s emotional upheaval.

Were they to stage their hometown composer’s Così fan tutte, the fictionalized sisters of Stift Nonnberg might ask, ‘How do you solve a problem like Don Alfonso?’ Directors and interpreters of the part contend with difficult decisions about the character’s constitution and intentions, Mozart and da Ponte having drawn a figure of chameleonic morality whose ambitions ultimately remain enigmatic. Under Pisaroni’s guidance, bass-baritone Ziliang Hao’s Don Alfonso was assured but never asinine, persuading without bullying. Singing boldly and with easy command of the range, Hao avoided the vocal bluster and acerbic scheming that can make the character insufferably pompous. There was a glimmer of genuine feeling in the voice in ‘Soave sia il vento’, and his Alfonso sparred with his male friends and captivated the ladies with equal fervor. In recitative, aria, and ensemble, text provided the impetus for singing, accentuating the mastery of the collaboration between composer and librettist. Hao’s Don Alfonso unashamedly enjoyed his game, but this was no ‘retired’ Don Giovanni still exulting in debauchery. There was no overt effort to explicate or justify Alfonso’s actions, which seemed to be the point. ‘Così fan tutte,’ after all: are gli uomini not as inclined as le donne to certain inscrutable behaviors?

The dashing Guglielmo, often portrayed as the more assertive of the suitors, was sung by baritone Young-Kwang Yoo with a finely-judged balance of sophistication and bravado. The effervescent swagger of Yoo’s vocalism enlivened ensembles without overwhelming the music or his onstage colleagues. Like all of the principals in this performance, he dedicated close attention to maintaining verbal lucidity even in the music’s most demanding passages. Yoo delivered ‘Non siate ritrosi’ captivatingly, the interplay between words and music propelling the performance. ‘Donne mie, la fate a tanti’ was sung with equal commitment to allying dramatic thrust with unimpeachable musicality. Musically, Guglielmo is no easy sing, the center of vocal gravity positioned awkwardly for many of today’s singers. In conquering this potential obstacle, as well as in credibly imparting the character’s impetuous machismo, Yoo’s youth was a boon, one upon which he instinctually capitalized.

Though initially paired with Ferrando, Dorabella is more temperamentally aligned with Guglielmo, her innate adventurousness needing little provocation to suppress orthodox propriety and capitulate to a new lover’s wooing. Mezzo-soprano Ashlyn Taylor King’s Dorabella was the epitome of a young woman immersed in the turmoil of finding her own identity amidst societal dictates and expectations. The voice’s shimmering timbre gave emphasis to the character’s lines in ensembles, but it was the intelligence of the singer’s interpretation that inspired greatest admiration. There were ascending phrases in which vocal comfort was compromised, but pitches were accurate despite moments of toil. An especially ebullient presence in recitative, King also sang ‘Smanie implacabili’ strikingly, articulating the text with wit. ‘È amore un ladroncello’ was shaped with complementary involvement, the voice serving as a conduit for the aria’s sentiments. King’s Dorabella was passionate but principled: both erotic zeal and conscience resounded in the voice.

Some of the afternoon’s most alluring and authentically Mozartian singing was contributed by tenor Hayden Smith, whose boyish but soulful Ferrando beguiled with expressive sincerity and tonal luster. A worthy comrade for Yoo’s Guglielmo, Smith’s Ferrando was deceptive without ever being duplicitous, his courting of Fiordiligi executed without ill intent—and thus all the more cogent when, contrary to his will, it assumed a measure of earnestness. The celebrated ‘Un’ aura amorosa’ was phrased with eloquence and subtlety, the voice gleaming and secure even when reduced to a wonderfully-projected mezza voce. The nimbleness with which the fiorature in the final scene of Act One were sung increased the injustice of the omission of ‘Ah! lo veggio, quell’anima,’ but Smith voiced ‘Tradito, schernito dal perfido cor’ with unflinching vulnerability that belied the unassailable technical adroitness that enabled it. Both Fiordiligi and Dorabella choosing Ferrando was an unexpected result of the opera’s sensual meanderings, but this Ferrando earned the double adulation, Smith’s singing consistently affirming Mozart’s comprehensive understanding of the mesmerizing capabilities of the human voice.

That Fiordiligi was in this production less an archetypal operatic leading lady and more a multi-dimensional young woman on the brink of sexual awakening was due in part to Pisaroni’s direction and still more so to the performance of soprano Yi Liu. As she sang the rôle, the expansive range of Fiordiligi’s music was dreaded by neither singer nor audience, the voice evenly produced across two octaves to C₆. Like her Dorabella and Don Alfonso, Liu’s Fiordiligi was affecting in her singing in ‘Soave sia il vento,’ and poised vocalism in ensembles was a considerable strength of the soprano’s performance. Defiance and indignation boiled in her voicing of ‘Come scoglio immoto resta,’ rhythmic precision heightening the potency of the text, and, as Fiordiligi conceded her acquiescence to Ferrando’s advances, ‘Per pietà, ben mio, perdona’ was sung with wrenching self-reproach tempered by an understated thrill of liberation. Like the production’s voyeuristic Cupid, Fiordiligi found contentment by relinquishing her flawed control over her situation, surrendering not to duty but to desire.

Perhaps, this production and the artists who gave it life proposed, it is not so much that ‘così fan tutte’ but, rather, that così dovrebbero essere tutti; or, as Cicero put it, ‘esse quam videri,’ it is better to be than to seem.