I do not know Prokofiev's legacy very well, and what I do know I don't really like all that much. But one of his pieces really had a big impact on me - the piano version of Montagues and Capulets from Romeo and Juliet, I still remember how I heard this for the first time, we were driving to the airport on our way to some island vacation and I was simply mesmerized, and then the whole time on these islands I was trying to recall this melody. I only learned later the tragic story behind these piano transcriptions (how he was prohibited from staging the ballet and he rewrote several bits of it for piano), and got familiar with the ballet itself (where this theme returns several times). After a couple of years I got these delusions of grandeur and decided to try and play that piece - and I'm still trying... It continues to amaze me with its almost Beethovenian simplicity, there's nothing there but two chords (E minor and B minor) which he just keeps breaking up in various ways, but the result is astonishing.
This piece is really seriously difficult - I spent a couple of weeks trying to beat it into some kind of decent shape and realized that at my present stage of development I can't play it better than this:
Here you can see how Kissin plays it. Note how he plays the "middle" part (in my recording it starts at 2:05) -- here the theme is first played by the right hand and then (2:35) the right hand starts playing arpeggios in two higher octaves while the left plays the theme in two lower octaves: he plays it so the theme is crystal clear, while I let the high notes of the arpeggios jump all over the theme and the result is a muddle... how he does it is a complete mystery to me, and this impresses me much more than standard pyrotechnic virtuosity. Of course my rendition has a lot of other problems, but I could not play even like this when I started learning this piece a couple of years ago... I hope to return to it in another year or two and see if it gets any better, now I have something objective for comparison.
Speaking of comparisons - for those who tries to compare this video with Chopin's nocturne that I recorded two months ago: yes I'm getting a haircut this week...