Prokof's piano sonatas 6 - 8 can perhaps be seen as a cycle of mental disease and treatment. The 6th is absolutely mad; a kind of Thai raw salad, with lemon grass, and mouse shit peppers, and all those inedible things added for color; the sort you bite and then the thing -- it bites you right back; but with shards of ground glass added for extra bite. The music bites you in the ears, then divides and clashes against itself, throws itself against the bars of its cage, raw and bleeding. It sounds like Aleksander Wat's California diary -- painful, heavy, impenetrable like a misbaked cake diary of madness. (Wat had been tortured in the USSR). From seventh on things ease off; the eighth ends on a quite (if not entirely) healthy note.
And no one plays them better than Richter.
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