Classical Music | Piano Music

Sergei Prokofiev

Visions Fugitives  Play

Sergei Prokofiev Piano

Recorded on 09/30/2011, uploaded on 09/30/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Though his homeland was in turmoil during the Bolshevik Revolution, 1917 was Sergei Prokofiev’s most productive year as a composer, witnessing the completion of his “Classical” Symphony, the Third and Fourth Piano Sonatas, the Violin Concerto No. 1, and the Visions fugitives (not to mention beginning work on a cantata and the Third Piano Concerto). This latter work is among the composer’s best known creations for the piano, all the while being one of his most striking and original.

Prokofiev composed the Visions fugitives during 1915-17. It comprises twenty miniatures, most ranging from a mere minute to two minutes in length, yet containing a wealth of musical ideas. These twenty pieces, though brief as they are, also display the maturing of the young composer, revealing a deeper expression and reveling in slower tempi. Also present is the use of dissonant harmony not unlike that of Scriabin, and the work’s composition coincides, though perhaps coincidentally, with Arnold Schoenberg’s own shift towards music based on short atonal melodic motifs.

Premiered publicly in Petrograd in April, 1918, Prokofiev performed the set for friends in August of the previous year. Present at this performance was the poet Konstantin Balmont, who was inspired to compose a sonnet on the music he had just heard. In this poem was the line: “In every fleeting vision I see worlds, Filled with the fickle play of rainbows.” Another friend present provided a French translation of the phrase “fleeting visions,” “Visions fugitives,” and thus the piece was named. Published in 1917, performances of the entire set are rare. Many pianists choose from amongst the twenty pieces which to perform, and even Prokofiev himself presented only a selection as encores to his own performances.     Joseph DuBose

Prokofiev plays Prokofiev

Dipartimento di pianoforte dell'Istituto Europeo di Musica: i lineamenti didattici di H. Neuhaus

The music published in our channel is exclusively dedicated to divulgation purposes and not commercial. This within a program shared to study classic educational music of the 1900's (mostly european).

Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (1891-1953):
9 Pieces from Visions Fugitives (1917), recorded in 1935.

Prokofiev plays this selection:
1. No. 9: Allegro Tranquillo
2. No. 3: Allegretto
3. No. 17: Poetico
4. No. 18: Con una dolce lentezza
5. No. 11: Con vivacità
6. No. 10: Ridicolosamente
7. No. 16: Dolente
8. No. 6: Con eleganza
9. No. 5: Molto giocoso