Prokofiev at War, by Barry Snyder

Portrait of Sergei Prokofiev, 1934 This weekend, Eastman professor Barry Snyder will be giving a once-in-a-lifetime performance of three incredibly powerful sonatas by Sergei Prokofiev. These sonatas contain some of Prokofiev’s most dissonant music for the piano. The composer’s biographer Daniel Jaffe has argued that Prokofiev, “having forced himself to compose a cheerful evocation of…