“Citizen. European. Pianist.” These are the three words Igor Levit uses to describe himself, the musician who will perform all of Prokofiev’s piano concertos at three concerts, with the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Described by The New York Times as “one of the essential artists of his generation,” Levit this time will play the solo in the composer’s most difficult, second piano concerto. The solo of Piano Concerto No. 2 was one that posed a significant challenge even for Prokofiev, and to this day only the most daring pianists are willing to perform it. The piece is introduced by the orchestral version of Prokofiev’s chamber overture written for original Hebrew themes; after the intermission, stories take center stage. Prokofiev himself composed three different suites from his ballet Cinderella, paying tribute to Tchaikovsky; upending the original order of the movements of the ballet, they nonetheless provide a good presentation of the plot of the three movements. This time, Iván Fischer selected movements from two suites for his Cinderella interpretation.

For his own works, Prokofiev almost never used folk music melodies or ones borrowed from other composers. This is why this overture, written for Hebrew themes, occupies such a special place in his oeuvre; it is more than a simple exercise in style. It is a rethinking of real Hebrew melodies. The composer was commissioned to write the piece in 1919 in the United States by clarinetist Simeon Bellison, who presented Prokofiev with a book of songs to serve as inspiration. Prokofiev rejected the request, but then fell in love with the world of the melodies after all. He sketched out the piece – originally conceived for the clarinet, a string quartet and the piano – in just one day, and then finalized it in less than two weeks. It presents and explores two themes in detail, evoking the world of the klezmer.

Prokofiev composed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1913, in response to criticism of his first piano concerto, and to commemorate his pianist friend Maximilian Schmidthof, who had committed suicide. The composer was accused of “futuristic impertinence” following the scandalous premiere of the piece. After the manuscript was lost in a fire, Prokofiev recreated and reworked the piece from memory. The version we know today, of which the composer said “the cats on the roof make better music,” is a work in four movements. Following the overture, where romanticism clashes with the grotesque, a scherzo lasting a few minutes is next; and after a sluggish, wry and grandiose intermezzo, the concerto concludes with a stormy finale.

Glass shoes, a pumpkin carriage, dwarfs jumping out of the clock striking midnight – yet Prokofiev’s Cinderella was composed during the darkest years of global conflict, between 1940 and 1944. The piece premiered only after the conclusion of the war, in 1945, in Moscow. The composer wrote orchestral suites from the ballet, but these were not limited to simply arranging various select numbers from the original score back-to-back: he transposed them, expanded them and changed their order. The first two suites contain almost only the music from the first two acts; they conclude with the end of the ball. In the third, the prince finally seeks out Cinderella.