Well, the piano has been and remains by far Khrennikov’s favorite instrument, even though during the past decade there were periods when it was rather neglected. Khrennikov's burst of creativity during these years produced one score af ter another in a variety of genres. First he was distracted from the piano by his work on a children's opera “The Boy Giant”, commissioned by the Children's Theatre directed by Natalia Satz.

It seemed at first that this opera would not require too much effort considering the nature of the audience. Actually, however, Khrennikov got so carried away that he decided to write a fairy-tale opera with a full-scale plot packed with vivid vocal, instrumental and dance episodes. The Boy Giant was a resounding success both in Moscow and in other cities. That was yet another example of Khrennikov's "forays" into a new genre. Unfortunately, there was no follow-up. In the meantime, Khrennikov's piano recitals were becoming more frequent and invariably satisfying for him. Khrennikov often said in the mid-60s: "Of course, the composer's chief business is to write music, but I find it sometimes very difficult to resist the temptation to perform my own compositions. Unfortunately I do not have enough time for piano practice. Even so I try to do what I can to keep my hand in and that is why I regularly accept invitations to play my Piano Concerto in different cities at home and abroad. These recitals help me to keep my performing flair intact and this does no harm to my camposing. True, mine is a composer's pianism, but I am glad to see that the audiences accept it. Perhaps he was being too modest there. The solid foundation of Khrennikov's "composer's" pianism, for which he tends to apologize, was laid during his years at the Moscow Conservatory where he attained a professional level as a pianist. This professionalism did not wear off with the years.

Incidentally, here, too, tradition has had an important part to play. Taneyev, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Prokofiev and Shostakovich were all superlative pianists and, perhaps, the best performers of their own compositions. Despite his incredibly tight schedule, Khrennikov stoutly refused to give up his piano playing, seeing it as an organic component of his work as a composer. Hardly anyone would surpass him in the interpretation of his own piano compositions. Their character and spirit harmonize so well with his own character and the spirit of his piano technique. Leonid Kogan the violinist once made this rather puzzled comment: I don't quite see how, with little more than snatched moments for piano practice, he can still play as well as he does. The impression you get is that he creates music right there on stage, telling its tale with his hands. Indeed, this "composer's" pianism compares favorably with the polished performance of many a professional pianist on account of its improvised brilliance and immediacy, its naturalness of expression. I fully agree with B. Pokrovski, who says that Khrennikov's music-making captivates you, infecting you with an amazing surge of emotion, organic fullness of sound and great intensity of feeling.

It was entirely logical, therefore, that his irresistable urge to play his own compositions before concert hall audiences should have prompted Khrennikov to add a new piano concerto to his performing repertory. This concerto, his second, conceived in the early 1960s was completed in the autumn of 1971. On the day of its first performance, February 8, 1972 Khrennikov told his friends: "I feel terribly excited. Though rather difficult to perform, my Second Concerto is fully in line with my policy of writing for piano in such a way as to enable the pianist to display the full range of his technical brilliance. I wrote it with this in mind." On the content of his new composition, Khrennikov was rather laconic: My Second Piano Concerto was conceived as a life-affirming composition designed to put the listener in an optimistic frame of mind and make him feel the joy of being a member of the human race on this beautiful home planet of ours, of being able to create. I also wanted it to be pleasant and to enable the pianist to test his virtuoso potential. I wanted to take a fresh look at this form and to overcome its standard. The Concerto is in three movements to be played without interruption. The slow first movement - a piano cadenza with an orchestral contribution towards the end; the second movement in fast tempo is a kind of follow-up to the first; the third is a finale with a major piano cadenza in the middle of it.

This rather lapidary annotation does not do justice to the concerto's content nor does it give an idea of its place in Khrennikov's work. And this place is important as the Second Piano Concerto and the Third Symphony that followed it were in many ways the focal points of the innovative quests of a mature master, refracted through the prism ofhis idiosyncratic talent. Let us hear what the musician who, together with the composer, was the first to perform this composition has to say about it. He is Yevgeny Svetlanov, conductor and composer.

What is the new element that the score of this composition contains? writes Svetlanov. In broad outline it is this: a broadly conceived, dominating and masterly solo part. Actually the whole of the first movement is a major solo piano episode which opens with a modest one-voice exposition of the first theme and is followed up by a polyphonic development of the musical material. As new voices are introduced the polyphonic structure becomes more complicated as new piano registers gradually come into play and the whole builds up to a tremendous avalanche of sound. The climax of this episode is completed by a highly expressive contribution from the strings and then the whole orchestra joins in a brilliant C-Major with a persistently repeated D-Flat in the high register. This episode will recur at the end of the composition thereby forming a kind of musical arch, gradually dying down with a persistently repeated bell-like sound in the same D-Flat against the back- , ground of a fading orchestra and piano.

The second movement, Sonata, follows without a break. lts music is extremely dynamic, full of explosive power, octave cascades and exchanges between orchestra and piano. In this movement the solo piano and the orchestra are equally important. In fact, they are in competition with each other. Only in the middle of the second movement does a new musical image, very typical of Khrennikov's music with its touch of gentle humor, appear in the orchestra and is later taken up by the piano. In this movement we again hear a broad piano cadenza. Extremely rich and varied, this cadenza, written in a virtuoso style, leads to a reprise. The second movement ends in a dynamic, aggressive finish which creates the impression that it is the finale of the whole composition. But it isn't.

The third movement begins. Here the composer, instead of providing sharply contrasting material took the line of .…. maximum resistance, so to speak. Instead of a slow and contrasting passage, as expected, Khrennikov provides a boisterous and rhythmically resilient Rondo, full of humor. The tempo of this section is moderately restrained. The crisp theme with the recurrent first four sounds against the background of a surging orchestral accompaniment captivates the listener straight from the opening bars. The whole of the finale is built along these lines in the middle of which the piano part is again assigned a fairly broad, polyphonically saturated, masterly cadenza. As a result of the finale's development, the composer returns to the music that concludes the first movement. This treatment of the cycle is original, if somewhat unexpected. Nonetheless, the form of the composition has been calculated with great precision and considerable conviction. It conveys very well the composer's unerring sense of the whole, his sense of proportion as between the movements and within each. And the more you listen to this concerto the more you appreciate the organic nature of its concept put forward by the composer.

This analytical profile of the Concerto conveys the impressions of an eminent musician as accurately and fully as words can express it. Here we have an artist commenting on the work of a fellow artist. It is difficult to add anything worthwhile to Svetlanov's description. Perhaps we should emphasize yet again the remarkable, dual-unity of the impulses that gave rise to this concerto. On the one hand, it marks the pinnacle of the composer's mature thought, intellectual concentration and conscious rationality in his approach to the material, its selection and arrangement, of his philosophical insight and an ability to get a bird's-eye view of the whole at a glance, as it were. On the other hand, the Concerto is full of youthful freshness, indicating the as yet unspent reserves of the composer's spiritual youth ….. This is no exaggeration and not a few critics have pointed it out in the context of Khrennikov's later compositions.

But of ten these critics and some musicians have ungraciously implied that Khrennikov's "spiritual youth" smacks of infantilism, belated naivete and attempts to recapture his own youth. But is it not, in this context, a hundred times more important that Khrennikov has a largely unspent ability for self-renovation? He has a flair for new ideas in life and in art, and an extraordinary sense of the present. The Second Concerto is ample proof of this. It is hard to say which of these two aspects of his creative personality surprised, and even puzzled, the critics more, critics who had long grown accustomed to pinning stereotyped labels on Khrennikov's compositions. It can safely be said that it was precisely a happy combination of these qualities that convinced and captivated the performers. That is why within a few years the Second Piano Concerto has joined the big league of the world's best piano works alongside the masterpieces of Prokofiev whose traditions Khrennikov has carried on so well.

Once again let us hear from a performer. It is always worth listening to a performer as he can always be depended upon to say something very subjective, in the good sense of the term. Indeed, a performing artist normally includes a new composition in his repertory for the impeccable reason that he likes it. He knows its merits and tries to put them across to the audience and, most importantly, his anticipation of audience response is usually unmistakable. Here is what Nikolai Petrov, a pianist of note, has to say: I have been fortunate to perform Khrennikov's First Piano Concerto on many occasions and I can testify that each time it was most enthusiastically received. Soviet and foreign audiences were even more ecstatic about his Second Piano Concerto. I witnessed the triumph Khrennikov scored af ter his own performance of the Second Concerto in a series of piano recitals in Spa in. I have played this Concerto in Moscow, Leningrad, Saratov, Kishinyov, Kuibyshev and elsewhere in the Soviet Union with the country's best symphony orchestras and I must say that each time I discover new facets, new colors and new expressive nuances in it. This highly evocative music seems to epitomize the world of ideas of an intelligent and original artist who sees in the world we live in not only its ugly conflicts, not only the seamy side of life but also beautiful things which make our lives worth living ….. Khrennikov's Second Piano Concerto is without doubt an outstanding phenomenon of Soviet musical life. Its exact and fresh colors, its excellent pianism and brilliant orchestration combine to assure for the Concerto a leading place in today's piano repertory. A searching, forward-looking composer, Khrennikov while staying within the mainstream of the best traditions of world pianism often strikes out in new directions, following untrodden paths and finding new forms and artistically convincing means of musical expression.

Soon af ter the Second Piano Concerto, Khrennikov completed his Third Symphony, which reflected his artistic credo at a new phase of his evolution. Although the scores of the Second Concerto and Third Symphony have much in common: grand scale, concentrated expression of the dominant ideas, an original interpretation of form and instrument al colors, their genre distinctions are manifest. Unlike many of today's composers who tend to turn an instrumental concerto into something of a symphony with a solo instrument, Khrennikov has remained loyal to the classical interpretation of the genre as being strictly dialogue-based. As for the symphony, for Khrennikov, as for his great predecessors and contemporaries, it has been and remains one of the principal forms of musical comment on specific issues of the day or on perennial problems of human existence. This rather traditional attitude does not preclude a fresh approach to a particular treatment of the construction of the symphonic cycle. Several years before the appearance of the Third Symphony, Khrennikov said: Some people took the view that the golden age of the symphony came to an end somewhere at the turn of the century with the demise of the leading lights of Russian and West European music. Fortunately, these theorists have been proved wrong. The symphony lives on and has been brilliantly developed in the twentieth century by brilliant masters. Suffice it to name only Soviet musicians: Myaskovski, Prokofiev and Shostakovich who have made an invaluable contribution to the development of this genre.

Text from the book "Khrennikov: His Life and Times" by L. Grigoryev and Y. Platek (Paganiniana Publications Inc.)