Grand Piano to Launch Tcherepnin Project

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

This coming Friday the Grand Piano label will release the first of two volumes to account for the complete works for violin and piano by Nikolay Tcherepnin and his son Alexander. During my high school days, I was vaguely aware of Alexander, probably because his orchestral Opus 80 “Symphonic March” had been rearranged for band. However, I do not think I have encountered any of his music (let alone that of his father) once I began my undergraduate years or at any time thereafter. Nevertheless, during the second half of the twentieth century, Alexander’s music received a generous amount of attention in the United States with Rafael Kubelik conducting his second symphony (Opus 77) with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner conducting that same ensemble in a performance of the Opus 90 “Divertimento,” and Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in his fourth symphony (Opus 91). More recently, the complete cycle of his four symphonies was recorded by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Lan Shui.

The performances on this new album are by violinist Klaidi Sahatci and pianist Giorgio Koukl. They are joined by cellist Johann Sebastian Paetsch for Alexander’s Opus 34 piano trio and Opus 47 “Trio Concertante,” but all the other selections are duos. Three of the four works by Alexander (including both trios) have been recorded for the first time, and the same can be said for all four of the compositions by Nikolay. It is also worth noting that Koukl prepared the performing edition of a violin sonata in C minor, which appears to pre-date the published Opus 14 sonata, completed in 1922.

By all rights this album should have been greeted as a “journey of discovery.” Unfortunately, there is an underlying rhetoric of blandness, which seems to have been passed down from father to son. The fact is that the entire project (which is scheduled to involve two albums) is due to support from the Tcherepnin Society of New York. Alexander was prodigiously productive after World War II, when he moved to the United States and eventually acquired citizenship; and, as can be seen above, his music was welcomed by American orchestras. However, in the current century, the inventiveness of both father and son have turned out to be, as the old joke goes about the monorail, “ideas of the future whose time has passed!”