Power and poetry: all-Prokofiev programme from Igor Levit, Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer at Royal Festival Hall

Prokofiev: Overture on Hebrew Themes – Iván Fischer & Budapest Festival Orchestra – Southbank Centre (Photo: Pete Woodhead for the Southbank Centre)

Prokofiev: Overture on Hebrew Themes; Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor; selection from Cinderella Suites; Igor Levit, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Iván Fischer; Royal Festival Hall
Reviewed 11 March 2025

The Hungarian orchestra on top form in a compelling all-Prokofiev programme featuring Igor Levit’s account of the second piano concerto combining astonishing technical skill with power and poetry

Pianist Igor Levit joined Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra at the Southbank Centre‘s Royal Festival Hall on 11 March 2025, for an all-Prokofiev concert that demonstrated music’s power to transcend political boundaries. The programme featured the three Prokofievs, the man living in Imperial Russia, the exile and the feted returnee, confounding our one size fits all view of Russian music in the present climate, allied to an orchestra (founded in 1983) that also seeks to reach across Hungary’s notable musical history.

The Budapest Festival Orchestra is having something of a Prokofiev Festival this month. In Budapest, Vienna and Heidelberg, Igor Levit will be playing all five Prokofiev piano concertos across three days. Lucky them. In London, we heard just one of the programmes, beginning with Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, then Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor and finally a selection from the Cinderella Suites.

Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2 – Iván Fischer, Igor Levit  & Budapest Festival Orchestra – Southbank Centre (Photo: Pete Woodhead for the Southbank Centre)

The Overture on Hebrew Themes was written in 1919. Having left Russia in 1918, Prokofiev is in New York and agrees to write a piece for the Zimro Ensemble for their line-up of clarinet, string quartet and piano, with Prokofiev playing the piano part at the premiere. It isn’t klezmer music, but one of the melodies Prokofiev used is a klezmer dance tune (along with a sentimental Yiddish wedding song). But it was only in 1934 that he agreed to create an orchestral version, and now that has rather overtaken the original.

In the orchestral version there is still a prominent clarinet part, but other wind instruments have their turn too. But Fischer and the orchestra chose to make the clarinet a feature and the orchestra’s first clarinet came forward to play the solo from the front of the stage, looking awkward in the moments the spotlight turned away from him. But the performance certainly did not disappoint, the orchestra producing vivid accents and rhythms, astonishingly varied textures along with a sense of engagement and discipline. Throughout the evening there was a feeling of clarity to their playing of Prokofiev’s music along with immense sympathy, a strong sound allied to super technique.

Prokofiev wrote his Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1913, whilst still a student in Moscow. He premiered the work himself and it evidently received a mixed reception, with boos, catcalls, applause and calls for ‘encore’. However, the score for this was destroyed in a post-Revolution fire and in Paris in 1923 (two years after writing his third concerto), Prokofiev reconstructed and rewrote the work, revising it so significantly that he admitted that it was effectively a new work. He was again the soloist in Paris, where it didn’t go down very well either. It is a concerto of formidable technical difficulty, largeness of scale and wildness of temperament.

For such a striking work, it began deceptively with Levit’s intimate, seductive piano supported by magical sounds from the strings, though as the work’s thematic material coalesced around the piano the music became more strenuous. The music was by turns violent and poetic, with a crisp firmness to Levit’s playing. Always mesmerising, his performance of the huge central cadenza was compelling, but this was about the music not about Levit showing off, and when the orchestra rejoined the soloist the violence was truly remarkable, though we ended where we had begun, with the more intimate, seductive material. The second movement, scherzo, is short and dazzling. Here the orchestra was fast and furious, yet light on its feet, with a constant stream of piano notes. Fischer and Levit kept the pace, this was a highly driven piece. There is no real slow movement, the third movement Intermezzo is dark in tone. The orchestra began in strenuous, menacing form, and though there were moments of lyricism from Levit, a harder edge crept into the music as it became relentless, the dark intermezzo turning into a menacing march. Throughout, Levit’s playing was tireless, yet compelling too. He is a restless performer, yet always he was engaged with the music whether playing or not. The finale came over as a vivid toccata, all power and violence with fast flurries of notes. There was a remarkable driving energy to the piece, but towards the end things evaporated to nothing, which only served to set off the disturbing violence of the ending.

Levit gave us an encore. What to play after this astonishing violence? Levit chose ‘Der Dichter spricht’ (the poet speaks) from Schumann’s Kinderszenen, intimate, poetic and profoundly moving.

After Prokofiev moved back to the Soviet Union in 1936, one of his biggest successes was his ballet, Romeo and Juliet which premiered in 1940 at Leningrad’s Kirov Theatre. A follow-up was commissioned and Prokofiev started work on Cinderella. Amazingly, despite the Nazi invasion the work would ultimately be premiered in 1945, at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. The work is still best-known in the UK because of Frederick Ashton’s 1948 ballet.

After the premiere, Prokofiev extracted three orchestral suites, revising the music for the concert hall. We were treated to a selection from the first and third suites, arranged for musical variety. But as if to counter this, before each movement Iván Fischer gave a short summary of what was happening. Prokofiev’s music for Cinderella does not have the symphonic sweep or grandness of his earlier ballet, but his suites use a seriously large orchestra.

We began at the ball, with a Pavane that was light on its feet yet full of vigour, the elegance modified by strong articulation and forward motion. Two movements dedicated to the step-sisters moved from delicate character to vivid scurrying with crisp articulation and lots of instrumental colour and detail. When the Fairy Godmother appeared we had ravishingly airy textures. A return to the ball featured the vivid excitement and rhythms of the Mazurka complete with insouciant violin melody. Orientalia, a stop off on the Prince’s search for Cinderella, was full of colour and movement, but intent too. Then we skittered along to the ball with Cinderella, the orchestra’s discipline and energy as the music got faster and faster leading to one of the best known numbers, Cinderella’s waltz with a fabulous sweep to it as the rhythms dipped and swayed. Come Midnight we had all the brilliance and vividness of Prokofiev’s imaginative orchestration for the incessant chiming of the clock, all noise and drama leading to the delicate transparency of the Prince and Cinderella’s final scene together, ending with the music evaporating into just the celeste. Pure magic.

We got an encore too! The gavotte from Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony.