An evening for heroes at the Philharmonic: Volodin, Kochanovski and a hand that erases the war

There is a moment in Prokofiev’s Fourth Piano Concerto that always brings unease before pleasure. The soloist, seated at the keyboard, lifts only the left hand above the keys. The right hangs by the body, motionless. Everything that follows comes from five fingers.

The concerto was written in 1931 for Paul Wittgenstein, the Austrian pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War. Ravel, Britten, Korngold, Strauss before Prokofiev, Wittgenstein forced them all to reinvent piano technique. Prokofiev answered with a work Wittgenstein in the end refused to play, finding it too modern. Tomorrow evening at Kolarac, the Russian pianist Alexei Volodin brings that complicated history back onto the platform.

Volodin and Kochanovski on one programme

Volodin has become, over the past decade, one of those performers who do not advertise themselves but arrive on the recommendation of other musicians. His pianism is described as a fusion of brilliant technique with restrained but intense feeling, which in practice means he does not perform himself but the composer.

The conductor of the evening, Stanislav Kochanovski, belongs to the younger generation of the Russian conducting school, with regular engagements in Amsterdam, Zurich and Berlin. Critics describe his baton as one of “aristocratic hands”, which usually means he builds dynamic transitions carefully rather than chasing showy gestures.

Two Prokofievs in one evening

The programme has not paired the First and Fourth concertos by accident. Chronologically, they are the opening and the summative point of one thought about the keyboard.

• The First Concerto was written in 1912, when Prokofiev was 21. It runs fifteen minutes, an eruption of virtuosity, and provoked a scandal at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory examinations.
• The Fourth Concerto is the work of a mature author, written two decades later, with a single hand at the keyboard and a structure that hands to the orchestra what the piano cannot carry.

The distance between the two works is the distance between a young man still proving he can do anything and a composer who has learned what really needs to be done.

Strauss’s self-portrait at the close

After the interval comes “Ein Heldenleben” (A Hero’s Life) by Richard Strauss, a symphonic poem in six movements written in 1898. At thirty-four, Strauss wrote a work about himself as a hero, with “adversaries”, a “companion” and “the hero’s works” as its movements. He quotes his own compositions, “Don Juan”, “Also sprach Zarathustra”, “Tod und Verklärung”. The audacity of this move remains a subject of critical debate to this day.

Strauss said of Ein Heldenleben that he was writing not about himself but about his “understanding of heroism”, yet the score quotes his own works to such a degree that whatever ironic distance there was has wandered off elsewhere.

The Kolarac hall has a limited number of seats; tickets were still on sale at midday at the box office and through the orchestra’s official website.

What this programme actually does

An Evening for Heroes is not a title that joins Prokofiev and Strauss as stylistic partners. It joins them as an inquiry into what heroism means in music. With Strauss it is an orchestral narcissist who made no attempt to hide himself. With Prokofiev, with Wittgenstein’s hand in the background, heroism becomes the question of how far one can travel with half the means.

Belgian critics, when they heard Volodin perform the same programme in Brussels in the autumn of 2024, noticed that the pianist in the Fourth Concerto does not try to compensate for the right hand. He lets it be missing. That is a choice that changes the sound of the work, and one of the rare piano interpretations in which what is absent is heard as much as what is present.

For an audience that comes to Kolarac for the repertoire and not for the names, this is an evening not to be missed. Will Volodin bring that empty right hand into his version of the concerto here?