Troisième Concerto en Ut pour Piano et Orchestre, Op. 26. - Signed and Inscribed

Moscow: A. Gutheil. [1923]. First edition. Réduction pour 2 Pianos par l'auteur. Upright folio. 71 pp. [PN] 10322. Inscribed, signed and dated 1932 by the composer in blue ink in Cyrillic at the had of the first page and with two evocative pencil drawings of the composer in an unknown hand on the front cover. Toned, a few pages with light fingerings in pencil, edges lightly chipped and with a large tear through one leaf (page 65-66), disbound with most pages loose or fully separated. Signed scores from the composer are rare.

The Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26 was composed in 1921, drawing on sketches made earlier. In a 1962 interview, Madame Lina Llubera Prokofiev, the composer's first wife, recalled her husband's working method at the time he wrote the C major Piano Concerto in 1921: "Prokofiev toiled at his music. His capacity for work was phenomenal. He would sit down to work in the morning 'with a clear head,' as he said, either at the piano or at his writing desk. He usually composed his major works in the summer, in the mountains or at the seaside, away from the turmoil of city life. Always he sought places where the rhythm of work was not interrupted, where he could rest and take long walks. So it was with the Third Piano Concerto, which he completed during the summer of 1921 while staying at St. Brévin-les-Pins, a small village on the Atlantic coast of Brittany in France."

Composed in time to take it on his 1921 American tour - which also included the world premiere in Chicago of his opera The Love for Three Oranges - the excitement (and publicity) surrounding that production generated a sympathetic interest in the new Concerto played by its composer. The work was a considerable success at its first performance, given on December 16, 1921 with conductor Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and of the five piano concertos written by Prokofiev, the Piano Concerto No. 3 has since garnered the greatest popularity and critical acclaim and has become one of the most popular works of 20th-century music, a staple of the concert repertory. (5557)

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