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Tcherepnin: Complete Piano Concertos Born in St Petersburg in 1899, Alexander Tcherepnin was the central figure in a veritable Russian musical dynasty. His father Nikolai Tcherepnin was a distinguished composer and conductor, whose works included the first ballet specially written for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and Alexander had three composers among his own descendants – his son Ivan, and his grandsons Serge and Stefan. On his mother’s side, he was a grandson of the French painter Albert Benois, the brother of the famous stage designer Alexander Benois. Tcherepnin began playing the piano and writing music in early childhood. As a teenager he both painted and composed prolifically, and soon came to know almost all the leading contemporary figures in Russian art and music, notably Sergei Prokofiev, eight years his senior and a pupil of Tcherepnin’s father, who often played his compositions in the Tcherepnin home. In 1917 Alexander began to study piano and harmony at the St Petersburg Conservatory, but the October Revolution and the threat of famine and cholera in Petrograd soon forced the family to move to Georgia, where Nikolai Tcherepnin became director of the Tbilisi Conservatory. Continuing his studies, Alexander absorbed a wealth of Georgina folk music, which had a strong influence on his later musical development. When the Civil War reached the Caucasus, the Tcherepnins fled from Russia and settled in Paris. In the early 1920s the critic Boris de Schloezer described Tcherepnin’s music as ‘fresh, spontaneous, and sure in style’. Tcherepnin himself considered his early compositions, up to 1921, as ‘instinctive’. They blend the Romantic traditions of Rachmaninov and Scriabin with the satire and grotesquerie of the young Prokofiev. Piano Concerto No.1 Op.12 belongs to this early stage of Tcherepnin’s development. Composed in 1919–20, on the composer’s own admission it was written to enable the soloist’s virtuosity to be displayed as effectively as possible, but in an entirely traditional manner. He even called it ‘a typical Sturm und Drang piece’. Cast in a single
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movement, with its expansive melodies it is in a way comparable to the First Piano Concerto of Prokofiev, and like that work can be regarded as a brilliant graduation piece. After Tcherepnin arrived in Paris he completed his studies as a pupil of Gédalge, Paul Vidal and Isidore Philipp, then embarked on an international career as a composer-pianist, debuting in London in 1922 with a concert of his own works. In 1923 Anna Pavlova danced in his ballet The Frescoes of Ajanta at Covent Garden. The 1926 Paris premiere of his First Symphony, with its scherzo for percussion alone, caused a near-riot at the Théâtre du Châtelet. By then Tcherepnin had begun to produce a much more individual music which revealed, along with a liking for experimentation, his skill in variation techniques, as well as a concern to build larger musical forms and more complex polyphony. The clarity and pungency of his orchestral textures to some extent reflected the example of contemporary French composers and the ‘neo-Classical’ Stravinsky. Tcherepnin’s early fascination with the ambiguity of the major-minor triad, which he had been using as a concluding chord, as if it were a consonance, since his student compositions, and the modal possibilities it suggested, led him to formulate a distinctive nine-note scale, C–D flat–E flat–E–F–G–A flat–A–B. Many of his works explored the manifold harmonic possibilities of this synthetic scale, which even became known as the ‘Tcherepnin scale’. Another personal development of musical technique was a system of polyphony which used rhythmic units thematically, which he called ‘interpoint’. In this technique a pair of contrapuntal lines can be linked by the notes of one line occurring in the silences of the other, and multiple polyphony can be built up by rhythmic displacement of imitative lines. Tcherepnin’s Piano Concerto No.2 Op.26, which was composed in Paris in 1923, is a highly characteristic work of this period, based upon the nine-note scale and using the techniques of ‘interpoint’. It was first heard in Paris in January 1924, not with orchestra but in a version for two pianos in which the composer was partnered by
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Nadia Boulanger. Tcherepnin was the soloist in the orchestral version a year later. Though it has little of the traditional rhetoric of the First Concerto, the Second makes very high demands on the soloist’s technical ability. The work consists of a single large movement arranged in five sections – Vivo – Thema con Variazioni – Allegro moderato – Presto – Prestissimo – that follow one another without a break. The principal theme of the work is announced by the trumpets at the outset. Later, a lyrical version of this theme becomes the subject for a series of variations, which is really the principal part of the concerto: these variations are mainly rhythmic metamorphoses of the theme, concluding with the theme heard in retrograde on a solo horn. The ensuing section is a kind of development, in which the original version of the theme and its lyrical variant are treated like first and second subjects and in contrapuntal combination. After a number of episodes, each shorter and quicker than the one before, the work culminates in a brilliant fast coda. (Tcherepnin re-orchestrated this concerto in 1950.) Piano Concerto No.3 Op.48 was composed in 1931–2 and is cast in two movements, a Moderato and an Allegro. The work was composed during a busy travelling schedule that brought Tcherepnin from Boston to Jerusalem and Cairo, and indeed its first theme was inspired by a song he heard from Egyptian boatmen on the Nile. Of all Tcherepnin’s concertos this is the one that most clearly shows the influence of the prevailing edgy modernism of its times, especially in the angular themes of the first movement. The Allegro finale contains a particularly complex and closely woven fugue requiring the utmost virtuosity from the soloist. In the 1930s Tcherepnin travelled extensively in the Far East, teaching Chinese and Japanese composers: in Shanghai he met the pianist Hsien Ming Lee, who later became his wife. During this period he began to abandon the intensely polyphonic writing that had concerned him and became preoccupied with Oriental and East-Asian folklore. He reinvestigated Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijan and Persian music, later becoming especially intrigued by Chinese and Japanese folk melodies. In
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China Tcherepnin came to be considered the Western composer who most passionately loved Chinese music, and he was tireless in his efforts to promote Chinese music around the world. Though composed in 1947, just before the composer’s emigration to the USA, Piano Concerto No.4 (Fantasie) Op.78 is much influenced by everything he had absorbed in this orientalizing period, with its reliance on folk-derived melody, its extensive use of pentatonic scales and considerable simplification of harmony. It is his first concerto in the traditional three movements and also one of the most extended of his ‘Eurasian’ works, and it includes, in the central movement ‘Yan Kuei Fei’s Love Sacrifice’, with its plangent cor anglais melody, one of the finest contributions he made to this genre. The opening movement, ‘Eastern Chamber Dream’ is however the most extended of all Tcherepnin’s movements for piano and orchestra. Here xylophone and wood block are employed to offset the solo piano’s rippling cascades. Indeed, the piano is often less a soloist here than an adjunct to the percussion department. Lucid instrumentation, wit and rhythmic energy are all present in this sometimes brittle, sometimes romantic, dream of the orient, from which we awake in the vivacious, even uproarious ‘Road to Yunnan’ finale. Tcherepnin was forced to spend the Second World War in occupied Paris. Later moving to the USA, he taught for 20 years at De Paul University in Chicago, and eventually became a US citizen, though he maintained a house in Paris as well as in New York and continued to be active as a composer and performer on both sides of the Atlantic. In this final period he consolidated the previous characteristics of his musical development, introducing complex polytonal chord structures – even tone-clusters – refined rhythmic syncopation, occasional flirtations with atonality, ever-freer forms, contrasts between simple and highly involved contrapuntal writing, and always an extremely effective use of orchestral colour. Though he occasionally used serial techniques, their significance was generally limited, and his works always retained a
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basis in traditional tonality. Piano Concerto No.5 Op.96 was written in response to a commission from the Berlin Festival and composed while Tcherepnin was holidaying in Switzerland in the summer of 1963. He played the solo part in the world premiere that October in Berlin, with the Philharmonia Hungarica conducted by Miltiades Caridis. Tcherepnin later made an alternative version of this work for piano and small orchestra. The three movements are a real synthesis of his development up to that time. The opening Allegro moderato is very free in form, and dominated by rhythmic contrasts. The calm restraint of the Andantino second movement is a reflection of its veiled sonority, achieved by extremely refined use of piano and orchestral tone. This movement is linked without a break to the Molto animato finale, which unites several contrasting elements, rhythmic, melodic and harmonic, while displaying the utmost pianistic brilliance and bringing the concerto to a rousing conclusion. Finally Piano Concerto No.6 Op.99, composed only two years later in 1965, is the longest, and in atmosphere the most serious, of all Tcherepnin’s piano concertos. It was commissioned by the Swiss pianist Margrit Weber and was premiered by her with the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Rafael Kubelík at the Lucerne Festival of 1972. This Sixth Concerto has something of the character of a testament or summing-up of all of the composer’s accumulated experience and wisdom. Again this is a three-movement design. The outer movements, full of lively rhythmic ingenuity, make much inventive use of a full battery of percussion. The expressive centre of gravity, however, is the lushly romantic Andantino, which evokes the Russian-Oriental romantic traditions, though in Tcherepnin’s own inimitable way. 훿 Malcolm MacDonald, 2011
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Recorded in January 1999 at Victoria Concert Hall, Singapore Recording producer: Robert Suff Sound engineer: Hans Kipfer Digital editing: Jeffrey Ginn Grand piano: Steinway D Piano technician: Choy Mun Hoi Cover image – Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev (1878–1927): The Harvest, 1914 (oil on canvas) Photo: Astrakhan State Gallery B.M. Kustodiev, Astrakhan, Russia / The Bridgeman Art Library Licensed from BIS Records 훿 2011 Brilliant Classics
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