Czech Philharmonic ⬩ Evgeny Kissin

On 21 October 1898, when Edward Elgar came home exhausted from work, after supper he sat down to the piano and began improvising. “What is that?” asked his wife Alice, who was captivated by the unknown motif. “Nothing,” he answered. “But it could be something.”

Elgar crafted his improvisation into fourteen variations, each being a portrait of someone close to him, in all but one case revealing their secret identities by their initials. It has been notably less easy to identify the composition to which the author refers by the word “Enigma” in the title. The composer himself posed the riddle but refused to reveal the anything more.

John Adams provides a rather detailed guide to his composition: “Frenzy sums up the feeling, at times overwhelming, of contemplating the current world around us, especially as it is imagined in our daily doses of digital news and information, much of which we consume without regard to its subversive and subconscious influence on our mood.”

Prokofiev’s decision to play a piano concerto of his own at the 1912 Rubinstein Piano Competition may have struck the jury as madness or, at least, as presumptuousness. Nonetheless, the 22-year-old composer won first prize. His compatriot Evgeny Kissin has earned a number of awards for his recordings of Prokofiev’s music.