Czech Philharmonic • Evgeny Kissin

Maurice Ravel (1875‒1937) composed the suite Ma mère l’Oye between 1908 and 1910 for the children of his friends, siblings Mimi and Jean Godebski. The cycle of five short pieces for piano four hands was inspired by the world of fairy tales. Ravel wrote that he wished to evoke “the poetry of childhood,” which led him to simplicity and delicacy of expression.

In Sleeping Beauty, time stands still around the princess, wrapped in a tender, dreamlike melody. Tom Thumb wanders through a dark forest, scattering pebbles to mark his path, only for the birds to eat them — and the music circles in searching. The story of Laideronnette takes us to an enchanting oriental realm of tiny pagodas, where a cursed girl is transformed into a beauty. In Beauty and the Beast, a melancholy waltz blossoms into tender magic as the Beast is turned into a prince. And in the final movement, all is filled with peace and light — the garden awakens, the fairy tales fade, and only a feeling of pure joy remains, the kind only a child can truly know.

Ravel orchestrated the suite in 1911. Its delicate instrumentation — without trumpets or tuba, but with harp, celesta and glockenspiel — creates a truly fairy-tale atmosphere. A year later he expanded the work into a ballet, in which the musical scenes are woven into a single story about the journey of childhood imagination.

Much of Sergei Prokofiev’s (1891–1953) large oeuvre consists of piano music, including five piano concertos. It is no wonder that he was successful as a piano student at the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire, and his contemporaries sometimes regarded him more as an outstanding instrumentalist than as a composer. His mother taught him the fundamentals of piano playing, and he learned the basics of music theory from Reinhold Glière. He began composing at age five, and he continued to perfect his craft under Anatoly Lyadov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, again at the conservatoire in Saint Petersburg. According to contemporary accounts, Prokofiev was eccentric, self-confident, and an enfant terrible in terms of his opinions on contemporary music. His behaviour attracted attention, but also resentment. At the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire, he studied piano and composition as well as conducting, but the school clung to tradition and was not eager to support innovation. Despite this, Prokofiev seized the opportunity to play his own Piano Concerto No. 1 in D flat major, Op. 10, when he took part in the conservatoire’s piano competition in 1914, and he became the winner.

He began composing his Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1911 at age 20. Having initially conceived a typical concerto with multiple movements, in the end he was drawn to the idea of a smaller form, which he described as “a concertino full of the joy of life and with an amazing opening theme”. What ultimately emerged was the shortest of Prokofiev’s concertos, the Piano Concerto in D flat major. In it, three movements seem to be combined into one. It is this grand, romantically conceived theme that becomes the linchpin of the whole composition, heard at the beginning, near the middle, and again at the end. It would not, however, have been like the young Prokofiev if that sweeping theme in octaves were not followed by brilliant passages for the piano, letting the soloist demonstrate outstanding technique, virtuosity, wit, and sensitivity for dialogue with the orchestra. The composer’s handling of tonality is very sophisticated, but he did not go beyond its boundaries. At the concerto’s public premiere in August of 1912 in Moscow, Prokofiev himself played the piano part, and on the conducting podium was Konstantin Saradzhev, a musician of Armenian descent. In his diary, the composer noted that the event was an exceptionally pleasing success, and that he was asked to play several encores. Prokofiev dedicated the work to Nikolai Tcherepnin, his conducting teacher.

For most of us, the word “enigma” automatically evokes associations with the legendary coding device used from the 1920s and made notorious by its use during the Second World War. Let us recall the scene from the film The Imitation Game and the electronic decoding machine built by the team surrounding Alan Turing: the pulse of a machine reminiscent of stereotypical rhythmic music, a depersonalised power capable of influencing the actions and fates of people (so close to the ideas of John Adams!). Naturally, the English composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was unaware of any of this when he composed his Enigma, the Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36 (1898–1899). At the time, it was not easy for Elgar to provide for his family on a teacher’s salary or to bear the repeated rejection of his compositions by performers and publishers. The fourteen orchestral variations were first presented to the public in June 1899 under the baton of the renowned conductor Hans Richter, marking Elgar’s breakthrough and the start of his rapid rise to fame.

Enigma, i.e. mystery or secret, is worthy of its title. Elgar conceived each section as a portrait of a friend, student, or family member. Scholars have successfully identified their identities for the most part based on the initials or other references in the titles of the individual variations. To begin with, there is a vary romantic characterisation of Elgar’s wife Caroline Alice, while the final variation depicts the composer himself. Experts on the cultural and societal milieu of central England at the end of the 19th century would enjoy an enumeration of all of these persons, but here we shall mention at least the amateur actor Richard Baxter Townshend with his ability to change the register of his voice (Variation III – “R.B.T.”), Elgar’s friend August Johannes Jaeger from the publisher Novello (Variation IX – “Nimrod”), and the organist George R. Sinclair and his bulldog Dan (Variation XI – “G.R.S.”). Besides the usual means of expression, Elgar illustrated the character and stories from the lives of his friends by quoting classical music, such as a reference to Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte in Dorabella (Dory Penny, Variation X), while “Nimrod” recalls a conversation between Elgar and Jaeger about Beethoven by quoting the Pathétique Sonata. Elgar also concealed another riddle that is undetectable to the ear, and it remains unsolved; incidentally, besides sports and science, Elgar is known to have loved riddles. Elgar originally used Enigma as the title of only the main major/minor theme (Andante), but already the first edition of the score (Novello 1899) bears the full title Enigma Variations. Of course, even without deeper knowledge of the specific individuals depicted in the variations, the listener can surely enjoy Elgar’s late-romantic, affectionate, and witty music.