Justice for Tcherepnin

SIMON, JOHN

On Music Justice for Tcherepnin By John Simon A family of composers is a rare and wonderful thing, especially inmodern times. Morepowerto the Tcherepnins: grandfather Nikolai...

...12, composed in 1920, Olympia 441, played like all subsequently mentioned Olympia piano concerto discs by Murray McLachlan, with Julian Clayton conducting the Chetham's Symphony Orchestra) goes back to the Georgia days, though premiered by Tcherepnin in Monte Carlo in 1923...
...This internationalist has Russian, French, Oriental, and American periods, and is hard to classify as to nationality and kind of music...
...52,1934-36), written in Paris, Shanghai, Myonoshita (Japan), and New York...
...One understands why Virgil Thomson pronounced Tcherepnin's music "filled with poetry and bravura...
...Two-and-a-half years later, these symptoms vanished as mysteriously as they had come...
...As he wrote, "To a Russian, the East is not exotic...
...One is the Second Symphony (Op...
...The opening "Idyl" centers on a park with bird song, church bells and shy lovers...
...87,1953, on the previously cited Marco Polo disc), with Wing-Sie Yip and the Kosice Orchestra, is a portrait of the City...
...The notorious First Symphony (Op...
...To fulfill a publisher's request for a children's piece, Tcherepnin rummaged among his juvenilia, found this, reworked it, and mailed off its one-minute-plus final version...
...The new auditory peace and recovered correct hearing became strong impulses for renewed productivity...
...and composer sons Serge, designer, manufacturer and marketer of the modular synthesizer "Serge," and Ivan, winner of the $ 150,000 Grawemeyer Prize, unfortunately already deceased...
...Well worth investigating, too, is Tcherepnin's chambermusic...
...Allegro tumultuoso, rhapsodic in character, and backward-looking, since the youth in the Caucasus was cut off from Western developments...
...4 incorporated an aria from an opera...
...They are very clever imitations of Chinese pentatonic music—impersonating such instruments as the kou chin (a kind of zither) and the pipa (a sort of mandolin)—and are partly based on Chinese melodies...
...By age 15, or at the latest 19, when he entered the Petrograd Conservatory (he simultaneously studied law), he had some 200 piano compositions, 14 of them sonatas, plus several operas and symphonic pieces under his belt...
...In the second movement, "Yan Kwei Fei's Love Sacrifice," Sostenuto, the Emperor's favorite, popularly suspected of being a bad influence, sacrificially kills herself...
...Yet another work ofthat period, the Suite for Orchestra (Op...
...With a charmingly unencumbered lightheartedness, this trifle closes the cycle begun with the Bagatelles, Op...
...it is familiar, a part of the Russian nature...
...Tcherepnin taught a generation of Eastern composers how to give vent to their native styles via modern Western techniques, and he set up competitions to encourage the dissemination of his teachings...
...Petersburg...
...In France Tcherepnin (the name, Nicolas Slonimsky informs us, is accented on the third syllable) joined the Ecole de Paris composers, who included Bohuslav Martinû and Alexandre Tansman, and his works took on the sophisticated elegance of that group and its era...
...This may account for the somewhat chaotic feeling of the opening Allegro moderato...
...Because it took a while for the composer to recover from a wartime slump, the orchestration dragged on from 1947 to 1951, two years after the Tcherepnins emigrated to the United States, and both began teaching at DePaul University in Chicago, where they remained 15 years...
...Finally, "Road to Yunan," Allegretto, evokes a merry highway jaunt to that province on a fine day...
...With the added impetus of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Alexander followed her to Brussels, and she became his second wife in 1938...
...That is a tall order for even a longish work (25 and a half minutes...
...In 1921 the Tcherepnins emigrated to France...
...The final movement, Allegro, an extended celebration, allows segments of the orchestra to go off in sundryjoyous directions, only to unite in a climactic tatti of total triumph...
...As someone who absorbed the folk music elements of whatever country he was in, he proceeded to adopt Far Eastern sensibilities and modes of expression...
...The opening Allegro maestoso features a splendid passage for flute...
...Anna Pavlova commissioned a ballet from him, Ajanta's Frescoes, performed by her at Covent Garden as he began his successful concert career in London...
...New to disc are two short orchestral works, Symphonic Prayer (Op.93) and Magna Mater (Op...
...50,1933...
...Pianists clearly favor them...
...if Rimbaud had been a composer, he might have written this piece...
...77, on the earlier noted BIS disc), started during World War II thanks to a commission from New York...
...The second movement, Andantino, begins and ends with a lyrical duet for flute and violin, with the orchestra supplying a discreet obbligato-like accompaniment, except for a forceful incursion in the middle...
...In Japan, he founded a publishing house for the printing of the works of new Eastern composers...
...The piano, representing the peripatetic composer, is the wanderer...
...One of Alexander's sisters-in-law had died of cancer...
...tour, and pronounced it "Apollonian, not Dionysian...
...The composer suddenly noticed some sinister changes in his until then accurate hearing...
...The first movement, Lento, features some very Chinese temple bells, good tunes, and a slightly melancholy fadeout...
...The music throughout paints scenes effectively...
...It was, our world traveler recalls, "a short monotonous song separated by brief intervals of silence," and it governs the first movement, Moderato, entitled "Wandering...
...The first movement, Sostenuto-Allegro, is a fetching combination of the jaunty and the majestic...
...And Claude Rostand wrote: "This abundance corresponds to a great interior wealth, intellectual as well as musical...
...The Orient was now part of Alexander's music...
...The perfect epilogue, however, is "Sunny Day," subtitled Bagatelle oubliée (Forgotten Trifle, Olympia 682...
...A brand new BIS release (1247) again features Lan Shui and the Singapore Symphony, with Noriko Ogawa playing the Second and Fourth Piano Concertos...
...Alexander continued his studies with Isidore Philipp and Paul Vidal, and began to make a name for himself as pianist and composer...
...The first important specimen of his chinoiserie was pianistic, Five Concert Etudes (Op...
...They imitate folk music persuasively, perhaps too much so, but a mocking orchestration imbues these miniatures with a tongue-incheek appeal...
...Nikolai's wife, Marie, was the niece of the eminent set designer Alexandre Benois...
...But none of this need be understood to appreciate Tcherepnin's music, which by highly personal means achieves pandemic appeal...
...Alexander is the great one, even if he tends to fall between the cracks of musical literature...
...One of the favorites with pianists and audiences was the early Bagatelles, Op...
...Tiring of technical experimentation, he was ready for his "folk cure...
...3 (Op...
...91,1957), commissioned for Boston by Charles Munch...
...Work on this last symphony (a fifth remained unfinished) was delayed for a Divertimento commissioned by Fritz Reiner for Chicago...
...The final Piano Concerto No...
...Indeed, the pomp of the fifth of them, Allegro marciale, seems to laugh at itself...
...In its daring variations of tempo, volume and orchestration, in which extremes of audacity rub shoulders with orthodox tunefulness—where anything goes yet everything coalesces—the piece cries out against its current neglect...
...The third movement, Vivace, displays a heady waltz among other tidbits...
...it contains a bewitching melody trying to develop, only to get repeatedly sidetracked...
...a sense of soul-searching remains unresolved as high woodwinds alternate with rumbling strings, giddy flute and piccolo passages with stern tutti...
...The same sort of intemationality did not hurt Igor Stravinsky, but good as Tcherepnin is, he is not quite in that league...
...His father, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and teacher of Prokofiev, taught at the Petersburg Conservatory and conducted at the Mariinsky Theater, as well as at Diaghilev's Ballets Russes where the great impresario put on two ofhis ballets...
...In its development there are no repeats...
...The whole piece exudes nervy, aristocratic playfulness...
...The Third Symphony (Op...
...Especially recommended is the Complete Music for Cello and Piano (Chandos 9770), a sort of cross section of Tcherepnin's musical thought, and a perfect introduction to this composer...
...The Stuttgart Radio Symphony under Hans Schweiger supports this marvelous piece with apposite dash...
...The first movement, a plaintive Andante, arouses sympathy...
...The Serenade in D major for String Orchestra (Op...
...In their house, you could meet everyone from Rimsky to Chaliapin, from Leon Bakst to Michael Fokine, from Diaghilev to Prokofiev (and cousin Peter Ustinov...
...On the same disc is the Fourth Symphony (Op...
...In five surprise-filled movements, it uses the strings with ingenuity and full control, as if they were an elastic single instrument of prodigious range and variety...
...IN 1934 Tcherepnin left for concertizing in the Orient, and, falling in love with the gifted young pianist Lee Hsien-Ming, stayed three years in China and Japan...
...they leave me rather cold...
...99, 1965) is a towering achievement in piano-concert literature and a kind of summary of aspects of Tcherepnin's oeuvre...
...The composer took the harmonica "quite seriously, with no writing down...
...Conflicts" conveys urban strife, selfishness and envy...
...The final movement is a slightly less involving rondo, but concludes with some stirring gestures...
...48, Olympia 439) was prompted by the song of a Nile—not Volga—boatman...
...Here I will focus on the other works I own on disc, albeit not all of them...
...Tcherepnin wrote it on his initial U.S...
...The Chinese influence is better absorbed and integrated in two later Tcherepnin works...
...Unfortunately, Tcherepnin's superb Harmonica Concerto (Op...
...The second movement, Lento, grants the harmonica a dreamy tune with some highly romantic flourishes, while the orchestra provides a dignifiedly restrained accompaniment...
...After one year of Conservatory, the Revolution forced him to flee with his family to Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of then independent Georgia...
...The third, Allegro, is a scherzo replete with brio, goodnatured cheer, and an exuberant close...
...From 1922 comes the popular Rhapsodie géorgienne for Cello and Chamber Orchestra (Op...
...Hence the Fifth Piano Concerto (Op...
...They moved on to Paris, where World War II stranded them, and lived through some pretty rough times...
...4 ("Fantaisie"), a piece of program music that deftly integrates the Chinese influence...
...No.7, a fierce prestissimo, persuaded Nikolai that the 13-year-old was, "by the grace of God," a composer...
...he spent the rest of his life shuttling between New York and Europe...
...96,1963), written in Baech,asmall Swiss town, on commission from the Berlin Festival...
...A further symptom was that music coining from a certain distance was being heard by him a halftone higher...
...The first movement, "Eastern Chamber Dream," Moderato, is a Chinatown resident's dream of a Chinese village threatened by a tiger the hero Woo Sung vanquishes...
...Adagio, next, starts with a wistful solo that builds into grand orchestral yearning...
...Quintessential Tcherepnin, it begins with a rousing Allegro marciale (he always misspells marziale) that is spellbinding: Midway between sentiment and irony, it nudges our feelings in antithetical directions as the melody fragments and reassembles...
...The second movement features all manner of percussion instruments in provocative combinations, along with percussively used strings...
...The final rondo, Allegro moderato, expresses the joys of urban life...
...6 (Op...
...The opening Moderato exhibits that typical Tcherepnin mood of interpenetrating sadness and pleasure...
...5,10 miniatures plus a coda, assembled by Philipp in 1921 from his student's teenage pieces...
...On Olympia 584 we get Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra (Op...
...We are in the presence of one of the most original [creative] evolutions, the most personal and most intelligent of its generation, attesting to indefatigable youthfulness of spirit, rare in a musician arrived at maturity and already famous...
...It is in one movement...
...Characteristically, the pieces use the full keyboard, often at its extreme ends, with the hands frequently far apart...
...The second, Allegro pesante, is a brief, boisterous piece of derring-do...
...Since my space is limited, I have decided arbitrarily to bypass most of the solo piano music...
...Once again we get the rhythms, though not the melody, of Georgian folksong...
...Marco Polo 223380 brings us theRussian Dances (Op...
...Young Alexander grew up in a perfect artistic milieu in St...
...47), written in 1931 and revised in 1968...
...The aforementioned Thorophon disc includes the Triple Concertino for Violin, Cello, Piano and Orchestra (Op...
...Though melodically sparse, variations of rhythm and harmony, rich coloration in both piano and orchestra, and the sudden emergence of brief instrumental solos make for amazing diversity...
...The ending fades into thin air...
...Condignly performed in today's concert halls, it would electrify both the most advanced and the most hidebound listeners...
...So he turned into a bridge between East and West, becoming not only director of the Shanghai Conservatory but also assistant to the Minister of Culture...
...The final Allegro again exhibits that characteristic cheerless cheerfulness as it ends in an understated, ambivalent gallop...
...The first movement's changes of mood are nothing short of vertiginous...
...It begins with an Allegro moderato that is once more night music...
...The opening Allegro is a powerful statement that yields to an obsessively repetitive segment, followed by a Presto that goes off in exploration of shifting moods and is, as often with Alexander, uncategorizable in its elusive mutability...
...During the rest of his life he was to concertize, playing mostly his own music—the reason so many of his works are for piano...
...The end is tragic in the orchestra but strangely noncommittal in the piano part...
...It evinces everdifferent musical forms that are marshaled toward a closing climax...
...a fine singer, she taught her son the piano, the boy getting to know music notation almost before he learned the alphabet...
...Finally, an Allegro maestoso shuttles between assertive flurries and melodious jigging with sophisticated harmonies, to end in a grand gesture of a finale...
...83,1953, Thorofon again) was dubbed "Chinese" by the publisher...
...5. These liminal and terminal bagatelles, like all the works in between, will surely not be oubliées...
...The opening three-bar theme, heard on two bassoons in high register, runs through the entire movement...
...the three operas, 13 ballets, and numerous other compositions remain unrecorded...
...The third, Andante, inspired by bird song, starts cautiously, then turns lively enough...
...The Allegro is sassy and leads into an irrepressible Presto that demonstrates how witty music can be in the right hands...
...The very quiet Tranquillo is poignantly tuneful, but yields to an Animato that ends with uncommon brusqueness...
...The second, Lento, is a nocturne for his deadfafher, featuring an eerie theme on the celesta, various night sounds, some haunting melody with many glissandos, and a solemn-sweet ending...
...25, on Thorofon 2021), with Georgian-like melodies, harmonies and rhythms...
...another one was gravely ill and Ming had gone off to nurse her...
...The Göbel Trio are the impeccable soloists, with the Nuremberg Symphony conducted by Uwe Mund...
...Some of its freshness is perhaps attributable to Alexander's release from teaching and Chicago...
...The initial symptom was a sharp tone that sounded almost uninterruptedly in his left ear...
...The 1931-32 Piano Concerto No...
...Next, an Allegro, tempo di valse, offers a peculiarly solemn waltz...
...Youcanfind some of it on Pro Arte 3303, Pantheon 20910, Dynamic 296, and MMG 10051...
...There are almost continuous echo effects as soloist and orchestra mirror each other, but as slightly distorting mirrors...
...None of the many doctors he consulted could offer help...
...The second movement, Allegro, is even stranger, with the piano often in treble range and the orchestra accompanying with a bass rumble...
...The very opening Allegro enchantingly lets a devilmay-care first theme play tag with a second that is, in a marvelously ambiguous way, both lyrical and dramatic...
...But the First Piano Concerto (Op...
...This caused him tremendous worry, especially since both his father and his grandfather had become progressively harder of hearing in old age...
...There was also a third son, Peter...
...Uncompromising yet gripping, the movement closes Maestoso, in a fortissimo boldly on the verge of the unendurable...
...The short middle movement, Andantino, is engagingly unassuming, and goes attacca into the last, which is chameleonic in tempos...
...The average length is one minute, yet each makes a distinct and distinctive impression...
...There he became fascinated with Georgian folk music, from which he derived the nine-tone synthetic so-called Tcherepnin scale, a precursor of serialism, and a polyphonic system he called Interpoint...
...A grandiose creation for large orchestra, it "somehow reflects," Tcherepnin wrote, "the agony of the War years, the rising hopes of a better world, the desolation I felt on the death of my beloved father, the mystery of death itself, the controversial feeling of a postwar period...
...Oddly accompanied by muted drums, it progresses to a marchlike propulsiveness, only to lapse into a woodwind meditation that yields to a peculiar pause-riddled lurching melody, with the flutes emitting some birdlike sounds, often in the highest register...
...Into the fourth, Poco sostenuto-Allegro, everything is thrown in from chirpy to brash, with a finale that fuses march and dance to finish the piece with a noble epiphany...
...Just at the time I became indifferent to my nine-tone scale," he commented, "I found its replacement in the Chinese and Japanese pentatone...
...Western influence on Russia might be materially important, but it is spiritually destroying, while Eastern influence is of great artistic and spiritual value...
...97,1964, Olympia 584) was commissioned by the Zurich Chamber Orchestra...
...It created a scandal at its 1927 Paris premiere, conducted by the composer Gabriel Piemé, who struggled manfully against rude interruptions that required police removal of the rowdy section of the audience...
...Shortly thereafter a second, somewhat higher tone joined it—the two were heard either consecutively ortogether...
...42 on BIS 1017) is performed by the Singapore Symphony under Lan Shui...
...this leads, first controlledly, then gloryingly, into sonorous emotional fulfillment...
...The ensuing Lento is the last word in tantalizing languor until scurrying strings take over, then yield to a quasiimprovisatory piano, followed by music of intense yearning...
...It is on "The Tcherepnin Family" (Olympia 640), which includes fascinating works by father Nikolai and son Ivan...
...In his book, Alexander Tcherepnin, Reich relates an unusual event that caused a compositional hiatus around 1959...
...But there, too, their sons Serge (1941) and Ivan (1943) were bom...
...Some of it can be found on the above and on three further commendable discs: Olympia 681 and 682, with Murray McLachlan, and Etcetera 1033, with Bennett Lerner...
...Buy, borrow or steal this work on Olympia 439, and let it transport you to the ultimate reaches of rational musical possibility...
...Nostalgia" is about the forlorn stranger in town—Tcherepnin arriving in a strange city for a recital...
...That evening, September 29,1977, returning withhis wife froma restaurant, he dropped dead around the corner from their Paris apartment...
...It is a rondo suggestive of a Russian peasant dance, with the soloist emitting the odd "evil-sounding cluster," in Phillip Ramey's phrase, and ending on an ecstatic note...
...The last movement, whose three themes are based on melodies thought up by the Tcherepnins' three sons in their early childhood, starts with an amiable Poco sostenuto harmonica cadenza, then turns into a hearty Allegretto that includes a sneaky sort of bass in the orchestra as well as some dapper pyrotechnics leading up to the initial bouncy melody, and ending with a sanguine accelerando...
...the second, Vivace, alternates between a fiercely masculine dance rhythm and a sinuously ingratiating feminine tune...
...Morepowerto the Tcherepnins: grandfather Nikolai (1873-1945), composer, conductor and pedagogue...
...Music was in Alexander's blood...
...Conversely, the following Chamber Concerto in D major for flute, violin and chamber orchestra is an 11 -minute masterpiece that won the 1925 Schott Prize...
...By 1937,Lee Hsien-Ming had already been studying in Europe for some time...
...The concluding Andante con moto is partly based on a medieval Russian requiem that turns into a dirge-like wail...
...Munch liked the piece so much that he doubled Tcherepnin's honorarium...
...The ensuing Lento is a night piece whose stillness is punctured by unsettling outbursts...
...86, 1953, Urania 5146), performed by John Sebastian, who commissioned it, is long out of print...
...father Alexander (1899-1977), composer and pianist...
...26) the one impassioned, the other whimsical...
...Here is the true Tcherepnin, whom Reich in his biography aptly called a " musical citizen of the world...
...From much the same time comes the other work, Piano Concerto No...
...rather, the basic thematic material undergoes a set of (in Willi Reich's phrase) existential experiences...
...37,1924), decent but unremarkable...
...In any event, only a small fraction of Tcherepnin's abundant output has been recorded...
...What makes this work particularly interesting is that its construction parallels that of a novel...
...From a queerly harmonized musical wash, a songful melody emerges in that unique equivocally happy-sad way...
...It is played equally well by Noriko Ogawa on the BIS disc, and on Olympia 440 by McLachlan & Co...
...The scherzo, Presto, starts an amusing "wrong-note" dialogue between the harmonica and the winds, each in different tonality...
...The version on Newport Classic 85521 by Martha Braden, who studied with the composer's wife, may be considered definitive...

Vol. 86 • September 2003 • No. 5


 
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