MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2024
60,000 reviews
... and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger


 
REVIEW


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Chandos recordings
All Chandos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 

 

Availability
CD: Buywell

Pyotr Ilyich TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23 (1875/1889) [36:13]
Edvard GRIEG (1843-1907)
Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16 (1868) [31:35]
rec. Walthamstow Assembly Hall, July 1993
Piano Concerto No. 2 in G, Op. 44 (1879-80) [41:49]*
Piano Concerto No. 3 in E-flat, Op. 75/79 (1893) [34:59]*
Peter Jablonski (piano)
Philharmonia Orchestra/Peter Maag, *Charles Dutoit
rec. EMI Studios, Abbey Road, December 1994
DECCA ELOQUENCE 480 0482 [67:58 + 76:56]

Experience Classicsonline

Peter Jablonski certainly has the sound and technique to do justice to the blockbuster demands of these concertos. In the "finale" of Concerto 3, he brings off the main theme's unidiomatic chordal writing with balanced, weighty tone; in the first-movement cadenza of No 1, the sequences of triplet chords are impeccably placed and balanced - a combination that eludes most pianists At the other end of the scale, Jablonski dispatches the light, scampering arpeggios and other rapid figurations with aplomb, though some of them miss the firmness and weight of his loud playing.

Unfortunately, the soloist's temperament, at least here, is mismatched to the blockbuster technique. Jablonski seems not to connect with this music, for all his technical expertise and capacity for putting out sound. Only here and there - and mostly not in flashy moments - do these performances transcend the workaday.

Thus, the B-flat minor concerto is marked by a capable but strangely dispassionate execution of the most challenging passages, and a fitful rubato in the lyric pages. The phrasing is musical, but doesn't mean much. There's a single flash of insight, at the start of the Andantino semplice's quick central section, where Jablonski marks off the top of the first arpeggio with a brief pause, providing a definition missing in the customary show-offy scramble. Similarly, the G major concerto, which doesn't avoid discursiveness here, only sporadically comes to life. At 2:13 in the first movement, when the clarinet introduces the second theme, Jablonski intones the piano's extended lyrical answer with a calm simplicity that's all the more appealing amidst the score's rhetoric. And the full-bodied articulation of the finale's quick passagework is impressive.

The three-movement work that Decca presents here as the "Third Concerto" isn't, exactly. Tchaikovsky began a sixth symphony in 1892; he ultimately abandoned it in favor of the Pathétique, but reworked material from it into a one-movement concerto, the Op. 75. He began sketching a second and third movement for it, completed after his death in 1893 by Taneyev and published as the Op. 79 Andante and Finale. There is some logic to performing the three movements together, since they're all derived from the discarded symphony, but the composer obviously didn't authorize the practice.

Jablonski's conductors are little help. Peter Maag seems unsympathetic to the B-flat minor concerto, to the point of allowing some slapdash playing in the coda, where the tuttis sound vaguely unkempt. In the first movement of the G major, Charles Dutoit here keeps a musical and steady, but none too firm, hand on the tiller; the tuttis don't sound grounded, and there's little attempt to elicit variety of color, though the conductor made his name in Montréal as a colorist. He's better attuned to the chamber-music quality of the uncut Andante non troppo - allowing the violin and cello melodies to blossom, fostering a pleasing interplay with the piano - and he propels the finale with springy dotted rhythms. Neither conductor nor pianist alleviates the high bombast quotient in the E-flat's "outer movements", and ensemble is poor in the first movement recap, with the strings lagging behind the piano's triplets at 12:08. But the central Andante, again, is appealing, with warm string sonorities and a singing quality; pulsing syncopations reinforce the forward motion in the faster central section. It's not by accident that I'm describing orchestral effects; the piano writing in this movement, largely comprising filler arpeggios, is more or less irrelevant.

The Grieg is an unusual if substantial fill-up - I suspect it was the B-flat minor concerto's original disc-mate, and at first the performance seems cut from the same cloth, competent and routine. The first-movement development abruptly comes to life: the flute and horn solos, haunting and pensive, bring a sense of involvement that remains through the rest of the movement. The Adagio is attractive, if not particularly individual, but then the finale's spacious second theme again elicits expression and nuance; a bit later, when the movement's main theme returns, retro-fitted into 3/4 time, at 8:24, Jablonski gives it a nice dancey lift and a light touch, though the momentum falters before the tutti.

The sound, a digitally homogenized rendering of Decca's old analog "house sound", is plausible but frustrating: a level that brings some presence to the woodwind solos and quiet strings leaves the upper brass sounding aggressive and raucous.

Eloquence's proof-reading department needs attention. The front of the booklet identifies the composer as "Tchaikovksy," while both the rear insert and the booklet's track listing render his first name as "Pytor"; the track-listing credits Christopher Warren-Green and Andrew Shulman as soloists in the wrong slow movement: that of the E-flat Concerto, rather than the G major.

Stephen Francis Vasta 

 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools






Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.