Comparison Recordings of the Tchaikovsky concertos:
No. 1: Byron Janis, Herbert Menges, LSO [ADD] Mercury Living Presence
432 011-2
No. 3: Michael Ponti, Louis de Froment [ADD] Vox Box CDX 5024
Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto wears
a gold medal along with Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra
for the best opening bars in an orchestral work from the late
19th Century. Bach won it for the 18th century for the Mass in
b minor, Haydn got a silver medal for the Maria Theresa Symphony,
and Beethoven won the gold in the early 19th Century for the Eroica
Symphony (or maybe the Emperor Concerto). I wonder how many recordings
of the Tchaikovsky work are never played past the first two dozen
bars?
This is a fine recording of the First Concerto,
opening bars and even thereafter. The balances are good, the orchestra
plays beautifully, Scherbakov courageously attacks the ferocious
cadenza in octaves in the first movement and gets almost all the
notes. Almost nobody can get absolutely all the notes, however
Byron Janis can and does. Obviously I don’t know exactly
what people were thinking at the recording sessions, but this
Third Concerto sounds to me like a careful once-through after
all the time available for rehearsals and retakes had been used
up for the First Concerto. Whatever the cause, the Third Concerto
is played off correctly, but uninterestingly. That’s a shame,
because it’s a very interesting work in its own right. Considering
how sick we all are of the First Concerto, at any given time,
I’d rather hear the Third. In 1892 Tchaikovsky sketched
his Seventh Symphony, then had second thoughts about the sound,
so he rescored the first movement as his one-movement Third Piano
Concerto, Op 75. Then he thought seriously about rescoring two
later movements from the failed Seventh Symphony as an additional
two movements for the Third Concerto. Then he died. Sergei Taneyev
obliged his departed friend and produced an orchestrated Op. 79
which allowed a three movement version of the Tchaikovsky Third
Concerto to be performed. Eugene Ormandy and Neeme Järvi
both recorded a completed orchestral version of the Seventh Symphony
and any Tchaikovsky lover will want to hear that as well.
Tchaikovsky said people should play his music
as though it were by Mozart. Almost everyone thinks he was joking,
but what he was trying to say was don’t over do the passion,
there is enough of it in the notes themselves. Play the notes
carefully and with grace and the passions will take care of themselves.
Janis and Menges were among the first to do that for the First
Concerto* and the result is my choice of the perfect recording
of this work. I’ve always despised the GREAT VAN CLIBURN
RECORDING perhaps for the same reason the audience loved it: it’s
a gross overstatement of things that don’t need to be overstated.
The indefatigable Michael Ponti who, along with
Alfred Brendel, earned our gratitude for making hundreds of First
LP Recordings of deserving piano works produced what may still
be the best recorded version of Tchaikovsky’s Third Concerto.
If not, it’s certainly the least expensive and deserves
to be in any music lover’s collection, at least until something
better comes along.
The sound of this release is very good, transparency,
dynamic range, and frequency response being good but not the best
this label is capable of on CD. I have not had the opportunity
of hearing the SACD or the DVD-Audio, however if the sound of
recent recordings on this label from these artists is any guide,
the DVD-Audio version of this recording may tip the balance to
make it a virtual must-have. A very good performance in stupendously
great sound can become an overwhelming musical experience.
*in stereo. The Scherchen/Farnadi version on
monophonic Westminster LP, however excellent the orchestral presentation
and artistic collaboration, was doomed to obscurity by critical
hostility directed at Ms. Farnadi’s unassertive pianism.
Paul Shoemaker
Konstantin Scherbakov, pianoRussian Philharmonic Orchestra/Dmitry Yablonsky