While still a student in the St. Petersburg Conservatory before the 1917 Revolution, Sergei Prokofiev was already known as Russian music’s enfant terrible. His First Piano Concerto in particular, with its spiky dissonances and acerbic melodic lines, clashed with the taste of the prevailing musical establishment and his teachers at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, especially its director, the conservative composer Alexander Glazunov. The New York Times review has become a classic. “…the piano all the while shrieking, groaning, howling, fighting back, and in several instances it seemed to rear and bite the hand that chastised it... There were moments when the piano and orchestra made sounds that evoked not only the downfall of empires, but also of fine crockery...”

Apolitical and appalled by the mayhem created by the Revolution – although unrepentant about his Concerto – Prokofiev left his native country in 1918, settling first in the United

States and then in Paris. But he never felt comfortable on foreign soil and by 1933, homesickness was consuming him: “The air of foreign lands does not inspire me because I am Russian and there is nothing more harmful to me than to live in exile,” he said to a reporter in Paris. He was spending more and more time in Russia, although his family was still living in France. In 1936 he returned permanently to Moscow, aware that he would have to change his compositional style to satisfy Soviet cultural dictates. Trapped during World War II and the ensuing Cold War, he was never again able to travel abroad.

In 1921, while composing his most famous opera, The Love for Three Oranges, for the Chicago Lyric Opera, he spent the summer in Brittany working at the same time on the Third Piano Concerto. Both works were premiered in Chicago; but while the opera was an outstanding success, the concerto elicited another decidedly cool reception.

Based on thematic material written between 1911 and 1916, which the composer had intended for other works, the Third Piano Concerto has emerged as his most popular. The Concerto opens with a gentle theme for solo clarinet. There follows a section of several rapid, virtuosic motifs in the percussive style (broken crockery) so common to the composer’s piano music, although here it takes the form of acerbic broken thirds and scales that eventually coalesce as a formal second theme.

The second movement is a theme and variations, but not in the classical sense with two repeated strains. Rather, the composer takes a long melody of 12 bars, giving it four increasingly elaborate and emotionally intense variations, the last of which fades off into a short, whispered coda.

Prokofiev had originally written two of the themes in the Finale for an aborted “white” string quartet, one without accidentals, which if performed on a piano would be played only on the white keys. The Finale is in rondo-sonata form, in which the rondo theme, one of the original "white-note" themes, is introduced in the bassoons accompanied by pizzicato basses. There follows a string of four themes, the last one another of the “white note” themes.