Lisitsa’s Intimate Impressions of Tchaikovsky

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

A little over a week ago, Universal Music Group released a Decca box set of the complete works for solo piano by Pyotr llyich Tchaikovsky. The pianist is Valentina Lisitsa, who, by now, has been generously represented on the Decca label. I have to say that, for Lisitsa’s many efforts to appeal to popular tastes (including opening up her 2012 London debut to cyberspace, devoting her intermission time to texting), the recording I still most value is her two-CD album of music by Philip Glass, which was released in March of 2015. Nevertheless, while this is likely to raise more that a few eyebrows, I would have to say that this new Tchaikovsky release makes a good “close second” to Glass.

The reason is simple enough: I would venture to guess that just about anywhere in the United States, listeners’ exposure to the music of Tchaikovsky is, for the most part, limited to his orchestral compositions. Where the piano is concerned, encountering anything other than the Opus 23 (first) concerto in B-flat minor is rare indeed; and the only departures from the concert hall are at the opera house, where performances of his operas amount to a fraction of his entire corpus in this genre, are seldom scheduled, and tend to be outnumbered by ballet performances of the Opus 66 Sleeping Beauty, the Opus 20 Swan Lake, and that old reliable Christmas entertainment, The Nutcracker (Opus 71). In other words, thanks primarily to “management decision-making,” Tchaikovsky is known almost entirely for intensely dramatic music and spectacle, more often than not rendered through hypertrophied orchestral resources.

The fact is that there is an intimate side to Tchaikovsky’s music that gets depressingly little exposure. Most of that can be found in his compositions for solo piano. In addition to his many collections of short pieces, he also prepared a compilation of 50 Russian folk songs arranged for performance by four hands at one keyboard. The one composer that chose to advocate this all-but-ignored side of Tchaikovsky was Igor Stravinsky, whose score for the ballet “Le baiser de la fée” (the fairy’s kiss) draws heavily on these more subdued Tchaikovsky sources (both two-hand and four-hand). Put another way, those who are really serious in their ballet appreciation are likely to find a generous number of old friends as they work their way through the tracks of Lisitsa’s collection.

I would also say that I took great satisfaction in listening to Lisitsa’s approaches to these pieces. If she could bring a Zen-like sense of calm to her interpretation of Glass’ approach to repetition and change, then there is a plainspokenness to her Tchaikovsky, sensitive without being saccharine. This is music that definitely deserves more attention. Lisitsa knows how to draw that attention from the serious listener without ever grandstanding her rhetoric. We all deserve to have a richer understanding of this side of Tchaikovsky’s approach to composition, and Lisitsa definitely has the technical and expressive chops to satisfy that need.