Russian Originals, De- and Re-Edited

[adriano]

There it is:

The culprits call their project "Tchaikovsky's Piano Concertos for the Third Millennium"! Oh dear...

http://www.mediafire.com/file/99jlbnvno48tt3g/Tchaikovsky+-+Work+for+Piano+and+Orchestra+-+Booklet.pdf

This also may be interesting:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/03/09/real-tchaikovsky/
http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Piano_Concerto_No._1
http://www.broadstreetreview.com/music/the-trouble-with-tchaikovskys-piano-concerto-no.-1-in-b-flat-minor#

Here is the score of the first edition:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/721ppzagpglt7ui/TCHAIKOVSKY+-+Piano+Concerto+1st+ed..pdf

In 1987, pianist Jerome Lowenthal recorded this 1875 version with the LSO, conducted by Sergiu Comissiona. It's available - with Lowenthal's recordings of Tchaikovsky's Concertos No. 2 and 3 and the Concert Fantasy (with its horrible alternate ending as a bonus) - on an exciting 2009 2CD reissue album by the Bridge label. Their first issues had been published by Arabesque records.

[eschiss1]

Ok. Please do not link directly to IMSLP PDFs, in part because they are not permalinks, for other reasons as well. It's polite practice to link to the workpage the PDF is on (inthiscase here where it can be found under the full scores, version "C", file #105370, scanned by/mirrored from the Russian National Library (RUS-Mrg) in mid-2011.

[adriano]

Sorry for not knowing this, eschiss1. But I could not find a link with a file #105370 , so I have corrected by quoting the list of the versions.
Interestingly, it looks as this is the very score I was allowed to consult at the Moscow (dependance building across the street of the) Lenin Library in the 1990s :-)

[eschiss1]

hrm. does searching (^F or command-F) for 105370 while on the page i linked-to help at all

[adriano]

I made another correction in my yesterday's message of 13:03 hrs :-)

[Christopher]

There it is:

The culprits call their project "Tchaikovsky's Piano Concertos for the Third Millennium"! Oh dear...

http://www.mediafire.com/file/99jlbnvno48tt3g/Tchaikovsky+-+Work+for+Piano+and+Orchestra+-+Booklet.pdf

Thank you SO much for this Hadrianus, it is much appreciated.  And I hope and am sure others are grateful to you for all this info.

[adriano]

My pleasure, Christopher 

[John Boyer]

Hanssler has re-issued the Koch Schwann recording of Hoteev's traversal of the Tchaikovsky piano concertos and Concert Fantasy. 

It's a mixed bag.  The familiar First Concerto is given in the 1890 revision for the first two movements and the 1875 original for the last.  The principle difference is that the latter includes a few developmental bars that the authors claim restores the proper sonata-allegro form to the movement, but I don't find it an improvement.  Tchaikovsky was right to cut it out.  If the overall performance is a bit slower than normal, it is only slightly so, and allows the work a sort of grandeur not heard in the usual traversal.

The Second Concerto comes off most conventionally.  Again, a bit slower than normal, which allows both for the aforementioned grandeur and also to give a more delicate, almost Chopinesque quality to the secondary material of the first movement.  Beyond this, it could pass as a typical performance of the original, non-Siloti version.

The Third Concerto is the least successful performance.  Tempos in the first movement are at first grindingly slow, though this improves with time.  Still, the movement persistently drags; the many opportunities for drama that others exploit are lost.  The second movement, however, comes off just fine.  The finale is somewhere in between, but really could have used a bit more drive.

The Concert Fantasy comes off best in the relaxed approach adopted by the performers.  Many of the melodies take on a different character, at times more Russian sounding (in the folk-like material) and at others more Chopinesque (in the more delicate material), just as in the Second Concerto.

The notes are still conspiratorial to an absurd degree, full of misleading or downright inaccurate statements.  They suggest that in 1998 there was only one recording of the original Second Concerto, but I well remember that by that time the Siloti version had fallen into disrepute and most newer performances and recordings were of the original.  The author claims this on the basis that the available recordings were not billed as "original version" and therefore must be the Siloti, but even Ponti's 1974 recording of the original for Vox did not bill itself "original version".  The author's assumption is just silly.  He further suggests that conductors refused to program the original because the didn't want to pony up the costs of hiring two additional soloists, another absurdity since the big violin and cello solos in the second movement are played by the first desk players, not by guest artists.

Much is made of Taneyev's alleged suppression of the second and third movements of the concerto.  Where all this crazy talk comes from I don't know, because Tchaikovsky himself wrote to another pianist, "As I wrote to you, my new Symphony is finished. I am now working on the scoring of my new concerto for our dear Diémer. When you see him, please tell him that when I proceeded to work on it, I realized that this concerto is of depressing and threatening length. Consequently I decided to leave only part one which in itself will constitute an entire concerto. The work will only improve the more since the last two parts were not worth very much."  This was Tchaikovsky's  decision, and while I think it a disastrous one, the blame for presenting to the world the oddly truncated work was his.

Tchaikovsky was a lousy judge of his own music.  He thought the music for The Nutcracker bad, that the Fifth Symphony showed a precipitous decline in quality from the Fourth, and that Manfred was so bad that he asked his publisher to destroy it except for the first movement.  He authorized disfiguring cuts in the Piano Trio, in which form I used to hear it when I was young, including the deletion of the entire development and recapitulation in the finale -- players used to play just the exposition then skip to the coda.  Ugh!  And yet he thought highly of the Second Concerto and even the Piano Sonata, a work very few love.  Taneyev did us all a service by finishing the scoring of the Third Concerto and I wish more performers would reverse the composer's error by playing the Op. 75 and 79 together.  But did we need all the conspiratorial fabrication that the notes to the recording still suggest?

Finally, I was re-reading Jeremey Norris's comments on the Third in his The Russian Piano Concerto and was almost amused by how much he truly hates (which is to say, hates) this piece, which he characterizes as having "...long stretches of unremittingly diatonic harmony [...], contrived counterpoint, rambling passages of pseudo-developmental intent [...], and [...] melodies of truly astonishing banality."  Yikes.  Whatever, Jerry, but I think it's a hoot.

For those of you who don't know Ponti's 1974 Prague recording of the First, Second, and Concert Fantasy, along with his 1970 Luxembourg recording of the Third, all re-issued on a Vox Box back in the early 90s, they are still hard to beat.

[eschiss1]

His self-doubt even hits his correspondence regarding his opera Eugene Onegin, which soon became among the most beloved, I believe, of Russian operas, and a particular favorite of the Tsar of the time besides.
Re the 3rd concerto, if it were Taneev who had suppressed the 2nd and 3rd movements, how is it they were published in an edition edited -by- him? How decidedly odd, yes.

[Ilja]

"Tchaikovsky was a lousy judge of his own music.  He thought the music for The Nutcracker bad, that the Fifth Symphony showed a precipitous decline in quality from the Fourth, and that Manfred was so bad that he asked his publisher to destroy it except for the first movement."

As an illustration of just how fickle Tchaikovsky could be, he initially lauded Manfred as the "best thing he ever wrote". I believe that the only of his own works he remained committed to was Francesca da Rimini.

[Christopher]

I love all Tchaikovsky's symphonies for their melodies and thematic narratives....except the Manfred.  I've tried and tried and tried but just find nothing to it.  I can't express it better than that!