Symphony no. 1 "Classical" in D major, op. 25

At the beginning of the twentieth century, composers searched for a way out of the exhausted grandeur of late Romanticism. Prokofiev’s First Symphony, the Classical, belongs to that turn towards earlier forms. Neoclassicism was not nostalgia, but a conversation across time: an old architecture reopened with modern rhythm, irony and clarity. In Prokofiev’s hands, the past becomes agile, sharply profiled and unmistakably contemporary.