In August 1914, Russia became embroiled in the First World War. Serge Prokofiev remained productive, but the following year moved to the relative safety of a small village in the Caucasus where a young girl named Nina Meshcherskaya caught his attention. The 24-year-old Prokofiev fell for Meshcherskaya and she him, only for their blossoming relationship to be abruptly halted by her parents. At around the same time, Prokofiev wrote a wistful melody that he planned for a ‘concertino’ for violin and orchestra.
Prokofiev never let global events slow his creativity and by the following year, his concertino was on the backburner while he raced to finish his opera The Gambler. Rather than withering away, the concertino was only incubated by that hiatus. When the composer eventually returned to it, he felt sure it should take the form of a full concerto. After the February Revolution of 1917, Prokofiev returned to the score and worked on it as he travelled by steamboat down the Volga and Kama rivers. He duly finished it, but the November Revolution meant it was shelved once more.
Six years later, in Paris where Prokofiev now lived, the concerto was ready for performance. The audience at the premiere on 18 October 1923 was famously star-studded: Pablo Picasso was there, as were Anna Pavlova and Igor Stravinsky. But Stravinsky was present to conduct his own Octet for Winds, and most of the audience was there to see and hear him do so. Parisians in the 1920s thrived on the new, particularly on Stravinsky’s fashionably hard-edged music. That made for a lukewarm reception to Prokofiev’s work, which was dismissed by the critic George Auric as ‘old fashioned’ and ‘Mendelssohnian’.
True, the concerto contained a fair amount of Mendelssohnian cheek and charm, which might have prompted Auric’s comment. It could certainly have appeared to signal a softening following Prokofiev’s acerbic piano concertos and monstrous Scythian Suite. Was that theme, born of the composer’s 1915 romance, responsible? Perhaps. But a more straightforward explanation is found in the instrument itself. Prokofiev was new to the violin as a solo vehicle, and appears to have found it more suited to lyricism than fissile percussiveness.
Either way, the concerto’s outer movements are more Romantic in footing than the more edgy, provocative scherzo. But the composer’s mischievous side is never far away. The violinist who made the work famous, Joseph Szigeti, said he was drawn to its ‘mixture of fairy-tale naiveté and daring savagery.’ Prokofiev claimed the concerto’s opening gesture perfectly encapsulated his belief in lyricism. This opening melody, played sognando (‘as if in a dream’), is the very one Prokofiev dreamed up in the Caucasus.
Soaring and rhapsodic, this theme returns at the movement’s close, orchestrated with a sprinkling of magic as a flute carries it home with support from the solo violin and a harp. Prokofiev calls for considerable virtuosity in between, as he does in the wild and fiendishly difficult scherzo movement driven by restless ostinatos. Lyricism returns in the concerto’s finale, whose energy soon abates to make way for a return of the work’s opening theme. This time, it breaks free of any harmonic and rhythmic troubles, soaring upwards with rapture and serenity via a series of trills.
The soloist’s journey through the concerto could be said to crystalize the central, fertile conflict of Prokofiev’s musical personality: unbounded lyricism versus destructive, forceful cynicism. A different but comparable dichotomy is heard in the music of Carl Nielsen, in which rhythmic energy finds itself pitted against forces that are frequently suffocating and overwhelming.
Unlike Prokofiev, Nielsen was a violinist. As a child he played the fiddle in his father’s travelling wedding band and later in life, following studies at the conservatory in Copenhagen, he found himself employed among the second violins of the Royal Danish Orchestra. By 1911, Nielsen had been contracted as a staff conductor at the orchestra that had, the previous year, welcomed a new concertmaster in Peder Møller, a celebrated Danish violinist who had returned home following a decade leading orchestras in Paris. With Møller’s return, Nielsen did what he had been considering ‘every day for the last quarter century’: he started work on a concerto for his friend to play.
Nielsen was frequently stumped during the process of composition as he attempted to reconcile his anti-Romantic, un-showy musical outlook with a form traditionally founded on virtuosity and emotional outpouring. The resulting piece poses a fascinating picture of Nielsen’s musical worldview and has provoked much critical debate, not least for its unusual structure. While Prokofiev’s concerto reverses accepted concerto form by framing a fast movement with two slow ones, Nielsen’s is in two halves, each containing a slow section followed by a fast one.
The journey those movements plot is just as unconventional. Nielsen’s long concerto begins with grandiosity and ends with apparent frivolity, encompassing all manner of characteristics in between: noble hero, impish pedant, lovable rogue. There are neo-classical principles at work in the Præludium that opens Part 1, before the upright song of the ‘chivalric’ Allegro cavalleresco takes root (Emil Telmányi, a noted interpreter of the concerto and the composer’s son-in-law, claimed Nielsen envisaged ‘a well coiffed Austrian military officer standing to attention’ in this section).
Part 2 is neo-Classical in foundation rather than gesture, opening with the exploration of a four-note figure associated with the name ‘Bach’ spelt out on the oboe. The music twists itself through chromatic motions towards a Rondo section in which Nielsen’s inner folk-fiddler squabbles with the orchestra. The composer described the finale as ‘a kind of half-cute, half-cheerful rickety movement, almost without willpower’.
Møller introduced the concerto on 28 February 1912 at a concert that also included the first performance of the composer’s Symphony No 3, the Sinfonia espansiva. Some were wrong-footed by the concerto’s two-part structure when it was first heard. Even more of a conundrum was the schizophrenic array of characters that Nielsen presented, some of them unlikely bedfellows.
But that, surely, was the point. In the popular song of its Allegro cavalleresco, the impish deconstruction of its Allegretto scherzando and even the two very ‘violinistic’ solo cadenzas, the concerto paints a picture of its creator. But it also mirrors the trajectory of Nielsen’s career as a whole: his roots in rural Danish song, his lifelong mischievous tendencies and the interest in complex polyphony that would emerge before his death.

© Andrew Mellor, 2017