BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV

Penned around 1860, César Franck’s Prélude, Fugue and Variations began life as one of his famed post-service improvisations as organist of St Clothilde in Paris, and their tenderly melancholic, lyric Romanticism transfers effortlessly to piano. After the flowing B minor Prélude, the central fugue is preceded by a slow introduction. The Variations then reintroduce the original Prélude melody, and conclude in B major peace. Of the several suites Prokofiev worked from his melody-crammed ballet, Romeo and Juliet (1935-6), his Op. 75 piano pieces celebrate his dual status as a virtuoso concert pianist – especially audibly so over the sparkling passagework of No. 4, ‘Juliet as a Young Girl’. Pianist-organist-composer Florence Price’s Fantasie nègre of 1929 celebrated both her status as a woman of colour, and her Christian faith, deftly working the spiritual Please Don’t Let This Harvest Past into late-Romantic classical style. Friendship meanwhile was the driving force behind Mussorgsky’s 1874 piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition, which depicts an exhibition of works by his recently deceased artist friend, Viktor Hartmann. Its opening ‘Promenade’ theme, which makes various returns, depicts Mussorgsky himself walking between exhibits.