LDV74

26 PROKOFIEV_VISIONS FUGITIVES Reflecting a similar gesture, the Four Études op.2 cleave to the composer’s most motoric aesthetic. ‘This toccata-like Prokofiev suggests sarcasm and cold fury to me.’ Since nothing is more impressive than reasoned animosity, they are the translation of a certain idea of terror. Myaskovsky saw the set as ‘a work standing out sharply from today’s mawkishness, anaemia and weakness’ and Guy Sacre evokes ‘the awakening of the piano’s hammers’. Yet despite the composer’s considerable efforts to keep his distance from everything that might bind him to tradition, he does not in fact move that far away from it, remaining viscerally attached to its constituent elements: clarity of rhythmand a constantly emerging feel for melody. There is an English proverb which says that a leopard cannot change its spots. Such is the case with the artefacts of Russian music.