“Complete” Tchaikovsky for Piano and Orchestra

courtesy of Naxos of America

This past Friday the hänssler CLASSIC label released a three-CD album of music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The full title of this album is Complete Works for Piano and Orchestra in the unabridged full versions. After a frustrating session with Amazon.com, compensated by greater success through a Google search, I have established that, for now at least, this album is only available for digital download, the best source being a Web page on the British Presto Classical Web site. Aside from the paucity of useful Google hits, this site is particularly advantageous in that the download includes the PDF of the accompanying booklet.

This album was originally released in 1998 by Koch-Schwann and remastered this past February. The booklet includes those texts that were written for that previous release. They were originally written in German, but the booklet includes English translations of the two background essays. The longer essay, written by Eckhardt van den Hoogen, gives an extensive account of what distinguishes the selections in this collection and why those distinctions matter. The English translation was provided by Michael and Janet Berridge. They also translated a Foreword by Andrej Hoteev, the pianist for all of the works included on the album, in which he briefly summarizes his approaches to all of the selections. The final CD also includes a “bonus” track of an Edison wax cylinder recording of the voice of Tchaikovsky and several of his colleagues.

How significant is this collection for the attentive listener? Regular readers probably know by now that I have listened to a rather extensive share of Tchaikovsky’s compositions, including recordings of the “usual” performances of the three piano concertos. In that context I was particularly interested in the unpublished Allegro movement in C minor based on the composer’s 1864 manuscript. The other manuscript source is Tchaikovsky’s 1892 embellished orchestration of the single-movement “Ungarische Zigeunerweisen” (concerto in the Hungarian style), composed by Sophie Menter, probably in partnership with her teacher Franz Liszt. Finally, there is Tchaikovsky’s Opus 56 concert fantasia in G minor for piano and orchestra, composed in 1884 and dedicated to both Menter and Anna Yesipova, whose full score was not published until March of 1893, about half a year prior to the composer’s death.

Where the concertos are concerned, primarily I was happy enough just to have a recording of an alternative approaches to performance. The only surprise came with the first movement of the third concerto. Like many, I know this music best because George Balanchine used it create the choreography for his “Allegro Brillante” ballet, whose title was taken from the movement’s tempo marking. Hoteev’s performance of this movement with Vladimir Fedoseyev conducting the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra chose a tempo that Balanchine would have dismissed as lame. However, according to Hoteev’s booklet notes, that brisker tempo came from a performance edition published by Alexander Siloti after Tchaikovsky’s death, in which the tempo is specified as Allegro brillante e molto vivace.

Taken as a whole, the accounts of the Hoteev-Fedoseyev partnership provide a perfectly satisfying account of the act of bringing musicological studies to light in the form of performance; and such partnerships are almost always worthy of highly attentive listening.