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?