Sergei Prokofiev

Provocation came first. The Second Piano Concerto, Sarcasms and the Scythian Suite were written to unsettle, and they did; but the Classical Symphony of the same years shows a composer equally fascinated by eighteenth-century proportion, and the sharpness never afterwards cancelled the lyricism. Born at Sontsovka in what is now Ukraine in 1891, taught first by his mother and then guided by Reinhold Glière, Prokofiev entered the St Petersburg Conservatory at thirteen and studied with Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Anna Essipova, whose piano teaching left him able to be his own soloist. The years in the United States, France and Germany produced The Love for Three Oranges, the Third Piano Concerto and the First Violin Concerto, in which virtuosity and long-breathed melody stop competing with one another. After his return to the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s came Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, the Fifth Symphony, War and Peace, and the scores for Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, which between them invented a great deal of what orchestral film music has done since. He died in Moscow in 1953. He left the St Petersburg Conservatory playing his own First Piano Concerto, which brought him a gold medal and the Anton Rubinstein prize, a Schroeder grand piano; his appearances at the Evenings of Contemporary Music drew publishers to his works, and Diaghilev commissioned four ballets from him for the Russian Seasons in Paris. The 1948 decree of the Central Committee listed his name among the formalists, and several of his scores were barred from performance.