Prokofiev’s career almost went backwards. He was an enfant terrible in Russia before the Revolution, a modernist iconoclast in the West through the 1920s and then, when the call of his native soil overwhelmed him in the 30s, he came home. His timing was appalling. Many of his motives were questioned, there was so much conforming to do to the Stalinist ideal, so much personal anguish, that his production of so much remarkable music is a miracle. His final five years were particularly miserable. He had several heart attacks, his first wife was inexplicably sent to a labour camp and, as nobody was performing his work, his financial situation became ever more dire.