Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas: A Guide for the Listener and the Performer (review)

As appealing to the casual listener as they are rewarding to the serious performer, the nine piano sonatas of Sergei Prokofiev offer material aplenty for a book-length study. In them, one encounters thrilling feats of virtuosity side-by-side with passages of earnest simplicity, heartfelt lyricism combined with intense rhythmic vitality and formal inventiveness, and the composer's trademark stylistic wit put to effective use within the context of serious concert music. In chronological and stylistic terms they represent the entire scope of Prokofiev's compositional career. With the possible exception of the First Sonata, about which even the composer spoke in apologetic terms (see pp. 48–50), these pieces constantly engage. Any student of music who undertakes an investigation into their world will find a reliable source of pleasure, interest, and inspiration for a lifetime. Any single book, especially a relative short one like this, can only scratch the surface of their creative depths.

A professor of piano at Yale University, Boris Berman possesses many of the essential qualities one would want from a guide into Prokofiev's musical world. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory under Lev Oborin, who won first prize at the 1927 Chopin Competition in Warsaw (beating out his close friend Dmitri Shostakovich) and premiered both of Prokofiev's Sonatas for Violin and Piano with David Oistrakh. Berman is also the author of another acclaimed book for pianists (Notes from the Pianist's Bench [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000]) and, perhaps most important, he has recorded the complete piano works of Prokofiev for the Chandos label. These fine recordings, made between 1989 and 1994, certainly deserve their place along-side other recent accounts of various sonatas by such impressive pianists as Yefim Bronfman, Peter Donohue, and Mikhail Pletnev. (A separate three-disc set containing only the sonatas was remastered from the original nine-volume collection and is available on Chandos 9637.) Students and teachers of this repertory will certainly learn much from Berman's observations, and the more casual, non-performing listener can also take a good deal from the book as well.

The book is arranged into thirteen chapters: one covering each of the nine sonatas (plus a brief chapter on the surviving fragment of a tenth), two introductory chapters on Prokofiev's life and stylistic evolution, and one brief conclusion entitled "To Be a Prokofiev Pianist." There is also a glossary for the lay reader, which includes both simple terms (e.g., arpeggio, inversion, triplet) as well as more complex concepts (e.g., sonata form, tonality, chromaticism). The chapter on the Fifth Sonata covers both its original version (opus 38, 1923) and its revision (opus 135, 1953), which was one of the few completed works on a long list of projects on which the composer was engaged when he died in March 1953 (see pp. 20–21). While its outer chapters do offer some useful information, the true heart of the book lies in the chapters on the individual sonatas. Each of these is divided into three parts, the first two of which are accessible to any reader while the third is intended strictly for pianists.

The first section of each of these chapters serves as a brief introduction to the sonata in question, its general stylistic characteristics, its performance and/or reception history, and so on. Often these introductions will provide intriguing commentary from other performers and analysis of the music. For example, Berman quotes pianist Sviatoslav Richter waxing poetic about the Eighth Sonata: "At times it seems to grow numb, as if abandoning itself to the relentless march of time. If it is sometimes inaccessible, this is because of its riches, like a tree that is heavy with fruit" (p. 171). Though such metaphors are typically not his style—indeed, one might characterize his writing as having a dry, bare-bones approach—Berman occasionally allows himself...