Andante, Op. 29b (1934)

Probably more than any other composer in history, Prokofiev clung to what he had written in his boyhood, at every period of his life reinventing music that had first come to him when he was still a child. In 1917 he transformed ideas from a boyhood symphony into his Fourth Piano Sonata and in 1934 reworked the slow movement of that into this memorably beautiful piece for orchestra. Through a delicate orchestral veil, woven with the assurance of a mature symphonic master, Prokofiev looks back to the innocence of his first musical thoughts from nearly 20 years before.

Note by Gerard McBurney