St Petersburg, Concert Hall

Tchaikovsky Piano Concerti


The XIV Moscow Easter Festival
Marking 175 years since the birth of Pyotr Tchaikovsky

PERFORMERS:
Soloist: Denis Matsuev (piano)
The Mariinsky Orchestra
Conductor: Valery Gergiev


PROGRAMME:
Piano Concerto No 3 in E Flat Major, Op. 75
Piano Concerto No 2 in G Major, Op. 44
Piano Concerto No 1 in B Flat Minor, Op. 23


Piano Concerto No 1 was composed by Tchaikovsky over the last two months of 1874 (until February 1875 he was engaged in the work’s instrumentation). It would appear that when working on the concerto the composer showed it to his favourite pupil Sergei Taneyev. This was the response of the young (eighteen-year-old!) student who told his acquaintances: “I congratulate you all on the appearance of the first Russian piano concerto   it was written by Pyotr Ilyich.” It is known that Tchaikovsky initially dedicated the concerto to Taneyev, though he subsequently rededicated it to someone else   Hans von Bülow who first performed the concerto on 25 October 1875 in Boston. The premiere proved a riotous success. Tchaikovsky wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov: “Imagine what an appetite the Americans have: at each performance of my concerto von Bülow had to repeat the finale.” Soon after (1 November 1875) came the St Petersburg premiere which initially drew contradictory responses. Nikolai Rubinstein, who initially had many grievances and had demands for rewrites (which Tchaikovsky categorically rejected), came to be one of the finest performers of the concerto. Tchaikovsky had an extremely high opinion of Sergei Taneyev’s performance: “I often see Taneyev,” he wrote to his brother Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky, “If only you knew how brilliantly he performs my concerto!”
One and a half centuries later Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto has become the same kind of “synonym” as the Fifth or Ninth Symphonies for Beethoven. Its strong heroic tone and dramatic pathos are blended with a virtuoso decorative style and, at the same time, with extremely delicate lyricism. The recitative-like style of the melody   as in Tchaikovsky’s operas   lightly and naturally flows into the rounded “arioso” forms that absorbed Russian and Ukrainian songfulness. The First Concerto is one of those pearls that has become a symbol of world musical classics. Who today would not respond to its “call”   the broad introduction of the French horns, the majestic colonnade of the piano chords and the powerful and dazzling main theme of the strings supported by the brass!

Tchaikovsky composed his Piano Concerto No 2 between autumn 1879 and spring 1880 and dedicated it to Nikolai Rubinstein. The first performance took place on 18 May 1882 (soloist   Sergei Taneyev, conductor   Anton Rubinstein), alas after the death of Nikolai Rubinstein. Having lavished praise on both the concerto and the performance, the public and the critics alike expressed their preference for the First Concerto, which by then had won widespread popularity. Tchaikovsky agreed with several critical observations and the cuts and suggestions of Alexander Siloti and, following the composer’s death, the score of the Second Concerto was republished in a second version (1897).
To this day the Second Concerto remains “in the shadow” of the First. Possibly because this   in its own way   vivid work lacks absolute integrity of an idea. The first movement is dazzling, a Liszt-like virtuoso Allegro, and attracts us with its inventively demarcated competition between the soloist and the orchestra. The second movement, Andante, unexpectedly gives the flow of the music a chamber-like quality: the expansive piano solo is answered by the expressive solos of the cello and violin (could this be a portent of the funereal Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano which Tchaikovsky dedicated in 1882 to Nikolai Grigorievich Rubenstein, “in memory of a great artist”?). The bravura finale is staggering for the contrast between the somewhat rough “low” character of the theme (for the umpteenth time Tchaikovsky was reproached for deliberate melodic banality!) and his masterful treatment of the classical form.

Piano Concerto No 3, dedicated to the French pianist Louis Diémer, was Tchaikovsky’s last work and was completed and instrumented (by 3 October 1893 in Klin) just one month before the composer’s death. The history behind the concerto is unusual: in the spring of 1892 Tchaikovsky conceived a new symphony (it was to be his Sixth   the programme symphony Manfred had been given no number). Having completed sketches of the first movement of the symphony and instrumented it by December, Tchaikovsky suddenly lost interest in it: “I’ve decided to throw it away and forget about it. That’s my irrevocable decision,” he wrote to his nephew Vladimir Davydov in mid-December. But new life was breathed into the symphony   its first movement was reborn in Piano Concerto No 3, on completion of which Tchaikovsky immediately showed it in the course of the first ten days of October 1893 to Sergei Taneyev. The latter was extremely critical of the work, saying that in his opinion the work was insufficiently virtuoso for a soloist. Little more than one year following the composer’s death, Taneyev first performed the concerto in St Petersburg (7 January 1895). The Third Concerto, it would seem, outwardly recreates Liszt’s model. However, in Liszt’s essentially multi-movement concerti the sections are simply closely soldered together. On the other hand, Tchaikovsky’s one-movement concerto is an expanded sonata allegro: in its themes and the character of its development, along with the composer’s ever-present images   for example the lyrical secondary theme, the final heartfelt “theme of love” in Tchaikovsky’s music   there are also many new features: grotesque, and “toy-like”, coming from The Nutcracker, and extremely evil, parodying the theme of love and bringing to mind the blows of Fate from the Sixth (the real Sixth!) Symphony. Following the broad cadenza of the soloist the concerto concludes with a reprise that once again brings to mind the melodic outlines of the work and the impetuously flying by coda that leads to the thunderous culmination.
Iosif Raiskin


Age category 6+

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