Sergei Prokofiev - Five Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Op 27

00:00 - The Sun has Filled My Room 01:06 - True Tenderness 02:39 - Memory of the Sun 05:33 - Greetings 07:21 - The Grey-Eyed King At the end of 1916, after completing the orchestral score of The Gambler, Prokofiev told friends he wanted to relax by composing a few shorter, more intimate pieces. He wrote the Five Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Op 27, in one short breath over a period of just four days (13 to 16 November). Around this time, Prokofiev had fallen out with his publisher Jürgenson and took several new works to Gutheil (a firm founded by an Austrian but which at that time belonged to Serge Koussevitzky) who, despite several previous refusals, accepted a number of pieces: these included the songs Opp 9, 18, 23 and 27, and piano works such as the Visions fugitives and the third and fourth sonatas. In the earlier sets of songs, Prokofiev had set classic Russian poets of the so-called Golden Age (such as Pushkin and Lermontov), Romantics such as Apukhtin (a close friend of Tchaikovsky’s), and only one contemporary poet, Bal´mont, who was a one-time leading light of the, by 1917, moribund Symbolist movement. In choosing to set words by Anna Akhmatova, who was at the time only a promising young hope of Russian poetry, Prokofiev allied himself to bright, modern lyrical forms with little extraneous verbiage, spare description, and clear forms. Akhmatova employed deliberately straightforward and concrete imagery to convey the sometimes morbid sensations of a society woman. The Five Poems were first performed at a Concert of Modern Music in Moscow on 18 February 1917; the performers were the soprano Zinaida Artyomova and the composer. The effect of this performance on Prokofiev’s reputation was overwhelming. Even Prokofiev himself admitted that ‘after these songs, many people believed for the first time that I write lyrical music’. Critics underlined his own assessment: Vyacheslav Karatïgin, writing for the journal Iskusstvo, suggested that ‘it is in the further development of the innate poetry of his art, in the enrichment and deepening of his tonal lyricism that I hope to see the further evolution of Prokofiev’s brilliant talent’. Yuly Engel went even further in his description of Prokofiev’s stylistic breakthrough: ‘one hardly expects to find tenderness, warmth, emotion or, in short, lyrical charm in Prokofiev’s music. Some say that the young composer has none of it. But after hearing the songs set to Akhmatova’s words, it is difficult to agree with this.’ Kathryn Cavanaugh, soprano Sylvia Keller, pianist