Remedying A Shortcoming

In terms of their works' acceptance into the standard concert canon, as the nineteenth century belongs largely to the Germans, the twentieth, it seems to me in my admittedly less than encyclopedic view of things, belongs largely to the Russians in the persons of Prokofiev (1891–1953), Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), Shostakovich (1906–75), and Stravinsky (1882–1971) notwithstanding the overlap of the Germans Mahler (1860–1911, German even though born a Bohemian) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949), both of whom had at least one foot planted squarely in the nineteenth century despite their productive creative lives in the twentieth.

Of these four Russian masters, the one regularly given shortest shrift today is Prokofiev, the reasons for which remain for me an insoluble mystery. Even Alex Ross, in his excellent, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, gives Prokofiev something on the order of less than half the verbiage of each of two of the remaining three. Of the four, it seems to me that Prokofiev is the one who produced the richest, most memorable, and most powerful music, all sans musical fustian of any sort; music that, in its lapidary perfection, reminds me of nothing so much as the music of Mozart at its lapidary best: not a note too much or too little; not a note out of place; and a clarity and precision of orchestration (including the "orchestration" of even the solo piano works) and musical narrative that's flawless, the evocative eloquence of the gestalt of all of which almost borders on the uncanny.

I’m not as familiar with Prokofiev’s total output as I am with the total output of, say, Wagner or Mozart, but that’s a shortcoming I plan to remedy in the very near future, finances permitting. It seems to me an expenditure of time, effort, and money that will produce returns more than sufficient to warrant the expense.