So here I am, about to conduct Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony again, and I’m once again overwhelmed with emotion. It’s a difficult piece – not just to play, though there is that element. It’s difficult because it so successfully (for me, anyway) brings to life the tragedy and horrors of the Soviet experiment.
Written in 1944 (in one month!), it’s just about impossible for me to put myself in his shoes – I am the quintessential “first world problem” guy, worrying about things like, you know, whether the internet connection is fast enough and whether West Side Market’s banana selection will be ripe enough. On the other hand, this piece gets inside me, and I feel a connection to humanity, cutting through all that separates me from Prokofiev and from the entire Soviet people. I feel an intense sorrow, yet also resilience. In the third movement, which for me is the kernel of the symphony, I get a sense of the soul of Prokofiev, laid bare. This is one of the hardest, yet most rewarding, stretches of music to conduct or play, simply because it is so raw, so human. You have to embody (literally allow these feelings to possess your body) such pain, such sorrow, yet the nobility of the human spirit is always present, always buoying you.
If I have hopes for this performance, they are that the audience will get past the surface beauty of the piece (and it is compellingly beautiful!) and join the musicians and me in communion with a desperate people at a horrific time. Because by doing that we’re able to use Prokofiev’s strength (in the fourth movement) to ascend, to heal again. I’ve always wondered why his Fifth Symphony has such a hold on me, but I think that’s it: it encompasses the whole universe of human emotion, the entire human experience – the beauty and the atrocity, the love and the sadness. So I enter this concert with solemnity but also with joy, knowing the astounding road we all will travel in the space of 45 minutes.
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