Portrait of Sergei Prokofiev — Mikhail Larionov

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Written for Irish pianist Máire Carroll, Sergey is a short ‘portrait’ piece of Prokofiev, a composer whose music means a great deal to me. There’s a duality to his work that speaks to the richness of his life: his is music where the formalistic, sombre, angular, or intellectual can give way to the instinctive, the humorous, mellifluous, or emotive all in the quick flip of a coin.   

A character piece in the 19th Century sense of the term (although the association stops there), Sergey is not a depiction of the composer’s style — it isn’t intended to sound like his piano compositions, necessarily — but is, rather, a reimagining of certain traits of his music I admire and covet. It’s my own short portrait of the composer as I, personally, hear him and love him.