Prokofiev’s piano concertos still retain their aura of scandal, their whiff of grapeshot fired by one musical faction at another. For Russia’s ancien regime Prokofiev was music’s bad boy, delighting in the anger and confusion he provoked in early works bristling with defiance, in “Suggestion diabolique”, Sarcasms, the Toccata and... the First Piano Concerto. Such music subscribed to a new, more muscular tradition of musical speech, treating the piano like an anvil and paying sardonic tribute to past Russian romanticism.
The demands in all five concertos are savage, and Victoria Postnikova, a pianist with a way of her own who invariably invites controversy, enters a competitive field. You won’t find Richter’s or Gavrilov’s metronomic drive and steely athleticism in the First Concerto, but rather a determination to underline the music’s heavily distorted romantic antecedents. Postnikova’s rubato at 5'11'' or in the con eleganza of the Second Concerto at 3'33'' is surely less tenable than a stricter adherence to the score. And in the Second Concerto’s daunting first movement cadenza/development she is, again, too indulgent to capture fully the music’s sombre and malignant advance. She is more successful in the Fourth Concerto, for the left hand only – music still inclined to rebuff all but the most ardent Russian pianists – and also in the Fifth, where her powerful technique resolves even the most ungrateful difficulties. But she is disappointing in the Third Concerto. Here, her robust, but heavy-handed approach reminded me of a previous EMI recording by Cecile Ousset (3/88 – nla) rather than Martha Argerich’s more fanciful and volatile DG disc. Try Var. 3 in the central Andantino where vitality and momentum are lost, or 4'45'' in the finale where the music obstinately refuses to soar and take romantic wing.
More generally, Rozhdestvensky and the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra are unsubtle partners and the recordings, dating from 1983-7, are on the close and airless side. Hard acts to follow include Richter in the First and Fifth Concertos (the First with Karel Ancerl on a long-deleted Artia LP, 11/57), Gutierrez in the Second and Kissin in the First and Third. '