Prokofiev ~ Visions Fugitives

Image from Visions Fugitives de la Russie

“It’s like it’s telling a story. Listen! It’s as though somebody is walking - creeping - downstairs!”

That’s Amy B’s description of the 16th Fugitive Vision by Prokofiev. The 8th Vision to my mind is so elegant that it might break if you listened too hard. The 15th has always conjured the idea of racing across the steppes in a train, slowing down for a remote outpost in the middle of nowhere, then accelerating away again. The 17th is a fragile child, almost not there, dainty, almost gone before he’s arrived… and so on. The longest of the pieces is 1 minute 45 seconds long and the shortest a mere 23 seconds long, but each is a crystallised world in itself, a collectio of light and shadow.Following on from my post about the chance hearing - and remembering - of dub poet Michael Smith on the radio comes a memory of discovering Prokofiev’s suite of twenty piano fragments, Visions Fugitives. I first heard them while sitting in a car waiting for my mum and my aunt to return from shopping. It was somewhere in Wales (maybe Swansea) and to pass the time I scanned the radio waves and, upon hearing some enchanting orchestral music, began listening to BBC Radio 3. The music comprised a series of brief, beautiful pieces that gave the appearance of fragments of stained glass alternately refracting shafts of brilliant sunlight and disappearing into dark corners. My mum and aunt returned and I begged them to allow me to listen on to learn the composer. Some weeks later my mum bought me the record, which I still have - and still can’t listen to because of my record player’s missing tone-arm weight and the lack of space at home to rig it up (one day, one day…) It was Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives arranged for orchestra by one R. Barschai. After quite a bit of Googling, I’m forced to conclude that this version is long out of print and may never have been released on CD. It was only many years later that I discovered that the Visions Fugitives were composed for piano solo, of which there are a number of recorded versions. They’re equally lovely, but very different.

I’ve only ever had a limited appreciation of classical music. At a basic level I’ve always found most orchestral music difficult to make sense of. Exceptions to this would be the above Prokofiev (and his two string quartets), some Britten, Ravel’s songs, a fair amount of early and later Schoenberg, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, oh and some of Sibelius’s symphonies. I associate my incomprehension with some form of sublimated rebellion, as it was pretty much the only form of music that my dad would countenance. Anything else was just noise (with the exception of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, which was extremely formative for me). I’m thinking that, just maybe, my attitude is beginning to soften. Must be age, I guess.

MP3: Sergei Prokofiev: Visions Fugitives nos. 15, 16 and 17.