A Year in Classical Music: 1926, vol. 3 Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, like so many other great artists at the time, called Paris home in 1926. The previous year had seen the premiere of his Second Symphony there under the baton of Koussevitzky, to an indifferent response from Parisian artistic circles. I really like the piece, but to be sure the Second Symphony is one of Prokofiev’s most dissonant and experimental works, inspired in part by the openness of Parisian audiences to the avant-garde and its “acceptance of difficult sounds” in music. After the Second Symphony the composer backed away from this experimental language, which he had used also to compose the Scythian Suite for orchestra and the Sacrasms for piano, among other works; he would say that the Second Symphony’s poor reception marked the one time in his career he worried that might be a second- rate composer. At around the time of the Second Symphony’s premiere Sergei Diaghilev, the great impresario and director of the Ballets Russes, suggested to Prokofiev that he compose music for a ballet on a communist theme. The idea delighted Prokofiev, who devised the ballet’s plot himself, in collaboration with painter and stage designer Georgy Yakulov, and named the work Le Pas d’Acier, or The Steel Step — perhaps better translated The Steel Dance. To be more accurate, The Steel Step doesn’t have a plot so much as it contains a series of related episodes that correspond to the propaganda posters of the Constructivist movement in Soviet art. The ballet’s first scene, which portrays the chaos of the world before the Glorious Revolution, depicts characters including street vendors and capitalist speculators at a train station. Then, in the second scene, these same characters have abandoned their errant ways are seen in a factory setting, operating machines. Constructivism was art in the service of the communist revolution; the glorification of machines and technology, depicted with an aura of religious mysticism as the tools by which Progress would be achieved and man would forge ahead toward the Utopia, was one of its primary concerns. Prokofiev composed The Steel Step in 1925 and ’26, orchestrating it while he was on tour in the United States that concert season. He adopted a simplified, diatonic style that moved away from the dense dissonance of the Second Symphony to lighter textures — not yet the Prokofiev of Peter and the Wolf, but a step in that direction. Prokofiev also prepared an abridged concert suite of The Steel Step in 1926; it’s about 13 minutes long, next to the 35-minute length of the complete ballet. There’s an exciting performance of the suite available by the Scottish National Orchestra under Neeme Järvi, on a solid album of Prokofiev orchestral music that also features the suites from his ballet The Buffoon and his opera The Love for Three Oranges. For a recording of the complete ballet, look for the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln with Michail Jurowski conducting; the album also contains Prokofiev’s ballet The Prodigal Son. The performances are a little bland next to Järvi, but they’re serviceable enough. There’s one other Prokofiev composition from 1926 to discuss: his Overture in B-flat, also called American Overture, op. 42. He wrote it during his concert tour of the States. It’s unusually scored for seventeen players: flute and oboe, two clarinets and a bassoon, two trumpets and a trombone, two double basses and a cello, two pianos and a celesta, two harps and percussion. I find it quirky but likeable — sort of like, say, Jeff Goldblum… they should make it his theme music in his next movie — and even if it’s not one of Prokofiev’s better works, it’s a good excuse to get a copy of the Prokofiev “Essential Classics” compilation Sony put together in 1997. Michael Tilson Thomas leads members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the American Overture, but the gem of the album is his performance of the Fifth Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra, a fantastic recording. Another Soviet composer associated with Constructivism — especially by way of his 1928 orchestral piece The Iron Foundry — was Alexander Mosolov. Where Prokofiev had abandoned his most experimental techniques by 1926 in favor of a more diatonic language, Mosolov kept to his own experimental language until around 1930, his music having by then come under attack by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. The RAPM was the more conservative counterpart to the Association for Contemporary Music, which promoted cutting-edge Modernists such as Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Shostakovich, and to which Mosolov belonged. But Mosolov — a devout communist who had volunteered for service in the Russian Civil War, and who voluntarily submitted himself to the official Soviet dogmas on art and aesthetics — would balk at the RAPM’s criticism of his Modernist leanings, and by the early ’30s he had simplified his own style in response. Even this voluntary simplification was not enough to save him from Soviet censure, however; in 1936 he would be charged with “counter- revolutionary activities,” arrested, and sent to the Gulag for most of the following year. After that, just as it would affect Prokofiev a decade later, fear of the consequences of violating the dogma of “socialist realism” broke Mosolov’s creative confidence and muted his artistic voice. Mosolov began working on The Iron Foundry in 1926, and he composed his First String Quartet that year, as well. The quartet is a remarkable piece, with an austere first movement that lasts fifteen minutes, followed by three short movements, each around two or three minutes long, that function as something like epilogues. The Novosibirsk “Filarmonica” String Quartet offers a good reading on a album that also includes string quartets by Roslavets and Knipper. All of it is fascinating music of great seriousness, and a good album to hear if you’d like to find out what else was going on in early 20th century Russian music besides Stravinsky and Prokofiev. Also composed in 1926 were Mosolov’s Two Nocturnes, op. 15, for piano. The Two Nocturnes followed immediately after five impressive and hard-to-play piano sonatas Mosolov composed between 1923 and 1925. Each around three minutes in length, the Two Nocturnes offer a concise and poignant example of Mosolov’s 1920’s style: abstract, and by turns somber and aggressive. They’re well represented on Herbert Henck’s album of Mosolov’s piano music on the always-engaging ECM New Series label. The Two Nocturnes come in-between second and fifth of the sonatas on Henck’s program. By the time Arnold Schoenberg turned 52 in 1926, he’d held pride of place as history’s most infamous composer for most of the past decade. It had been twenty years earlier, around 1905 and ’06, that he’d begun to fully abandon tonality, and just two years earlier, in 1924, that the first of his entirely twelve-tone compositions, the op. 25 Suite for piano, was published. For as unlikely as it seems when you first listen to this sort of music, though, Schoenberg considered himself a traditionalist — a traditionalist who had perceived that the intrinsic logic of Western music had made the tonal system necessarily and unavoidably obsolete by that point in music’s historical development. This conviction — that a composer’s duty was to attend to the innate logic of the Western musical tradition — made Schoenberg sharply critical of trends that defied this logic, and that sought instead to adapt music to practical concerns or to trends in popular culture. Two such trends in German art music in the ’20s were Gebrauchsmusik and the Zeitoper. Gebrauchsmusik, with which we associate with Paul Hindemith among others, means “music for use,” or “utility music,” the idea being that art which also serves a practical purpose is of greater value than art solely for its own sake. The Zeitoper, a form of light opera that was wildly popular especially in Berlin during the Weimar period, was concerned with the social issues of the day, and with reflecting the realities of contemporary culture. It incorporated state-of-the-art 1920’s technology such as telephones and elevators, along with jazz and popular song styles. For Schoenberg, these trends missed the deeper meaning of music, reducing it to the level of passing fashion and novelty; and being the oversensitive and monumentally difficult man that he was, he was particularly angry when certain composers of the younger generation who embraced these trends criticized him personally. And so, in 1926, Schoenberg composed his Three Satires for Mixed Chorus. Each of the three satires is of one of the young composer who’d publicly attacked Schoenberg, but Schoenberg did not directly satire these composers’ musical styles; instead the music is strictly twelve-tone, the satire coming through the words Schoenberg set to music. The first, for a capella choir, is directed at Ernst Krenek, the quintessential composer of Zeitopern. The second, also a capella, mocks Stravinsky. These first two satires are brief movements, each around one minute long; the third and final satire is a ten-minute “Little Cantata,” the chorus accompanied by viola, cello, and piano. It’s a satire of music theorist Hugo Riemann, who had criticized Schoenberg in his Dictionary of Music. The text parodies a composer who experiments with various different musical styles in search of a musical orthodoxy, eventually settling on a “pure and perfect” classical style by the end. Given its masterful counterpoint together with Schoenberg’s remarkable new method of organizing his pitch material, the Three Satires are an incredible technical achievement in the craft of music composition; but they’re also twelve-tone music that’s a lot of fun to listen to.