Tchaikovsky

Vassily Primakov (Artist, Performer), Tchaikovsky (Composer), Primakov (Conductor) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Vassily Primakov
• Conductor: Primakov
• Composer: Tchaikovsky
• Audio CD (January 12, 2009)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Bridge
• ASIN: B001P1RKF6
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #332,971 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vassily Primakov: Tchaikovsky Seasons + Grand Sonata G Major: A Labor Of Love, January 8, 2011

By 

Dan Fee "music fan aka drdanfee" (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tchaikovsky (Audio CD)

Nearly everybody who has a collection of piano music discs, already has a favorite disc of Tchaikovsky's cycle of short piano works, called The Seasons - or, alternatively, The Months. Twelve occasional pieces of music, composed on commission by the composer for publication in a local St. Petersburg magazine; probably played more by piano students and amateurs, than by the big wig music professionals.

Nobody disputes the winsome charms of the grand piano in this cycle; yet Tchaikovsky himself waxed and waned about their value, as indeed he did with all or most of his symphonies. He never claimed to do more than dash off each piece to order; yet hardly anything in this cycle seems wrecked by haste, or by any failure of the musical ear or the musical imagination. Played competently, the music nearly always makes a positive impression. That's a sturdy success that provokes allegiance from many an average pianist. Played well, the music conveys a sense of revisiting Tchaikovsky's genius on a more intimate level - with passing reverberations of his fascinating ways, with a melody, with rhythms, with Russian folk music colors, and with European musical sophistication - all deftly miniaturized in retrospectively shimmering, jewel-like settings. Played very well, this music becomes an intimate window on the composer's own love of music, channeled through the instrument and the performer.

My own love affair with The Seasons probably began in college. I remember a two disc vinyl LP set - one disc had Svetlanov conducting an orchestrated version of the cycle, the other disc had a piano solo original version, played by Shura Cherkassky. If the solo cycle gets damned with faint praise, just imagine how cheesy a sideshow the orchestrated versions will seem to be? I ended up falling for both. So be forewarned, I guess my liking for both says a lot about me from certain angles of my being a Tchaikovsky fan.

Now LP has long been replaced by red book CD, and more. Sure enough, The Seasons have already made it into super audio recordings. Famed pianist turned conductor, Christoph Eschenbach, split the cycle as filler music, between two of his Tchaikovsky symphony discs (4th, 5th ) with Philadelphia. Ordinarily, I get jarred when discs mix and match genres like that, but in this case, I was surprised to find I didn't mind at all. Downside is, you still do not get The Seasons, all on one Eschenbach disc. Ronan O'Hara offers up some tasty selections to fill our his Royal Philharmonic disc of the first piano concerto. Hideyo Harada offers up the series complete, partnered with the Rachmaninoff Corelli Variations. Olli Mustonen fills out his Seasons disc with Rachmaninoff's second piano sonata.

The cultural fashion that rather began with having a grand piano in every home, along with people to play and people to listen after dinner, now seems to have transferred to recordings. Too bad the composer isn't alive to cash his royalty checks, as the catalog list is long. You can find the whole Seasons cycle by quite a few players with considerable reputations. My own latest rave has been Denis Matsuev. And yes, I raved about Constantine Orbellian doing an orchestrated version with the Russian Chamber Orchestra. Still love that particular Russian cheese, after all these years.

Our pianist here is young Vassily Primakov. Born Moscow, 1979. He's making quite a splash in the world's concert halls. He attended Juilliard, and won prizes there. If you want to hear something of his special way with Chopin, you can get the piano concertos and some solo Chopin. The key to Primakov in Chopin is rubato - hard to describe or analyze, but when you hear Primakov's rubato, you will be stuck by his awesome wizardry, stealing time ever so fabulously above an utterly rock solid foundation. Primakov makes his rubato sound way out and eccentric, but he never, ever loses his rubato balance on an underlying foundation, tempo plus harmony, as written.

Add Primakov's name to that sleeper list of other excellent, but somewhat neglected, players - Konstantin Lifschitz, Sergey Schepkin? Primakov's magical rubato serves well in Chopin, but what about Tchaikovsky?

Not to worry. In The Seasons, Primakov adopts a much more direct manner, though he is still wide awake to delectable phrasing in all those luscious Tchaikovsky melodies. He finds a musical way to balance the keyboard harmony in each little piece, and etches the underlying tempo as well as the passing phrased rhythms, with winning vitality. He avoids triggering any weary sense of repetition that one risks by listening to twelve pieces in a row, all with the ABA form. The colors in all seasons flash and burn and sparkle and mist - a listener is charmed while being drawn into the virtual physicalities of the twelve-part cycle. By the time we got to December, I realized that this reading was one of the really good ones, so that what remained was that familiar, deep sense of Tchaikovsky being in love with music. Ineffably, Primakov's playing often reminds audiences of his own love affair with the piano. We can do a whole lot worse than hear a pianist in love with the instrument, as with music entire?

The disc fills out with a much less well known work, Tchaikovsky's Grand Sonata in G major, Opus 37. It is the third and last piano sonata by the composer, but who knew much of any of the piano sonatas? One rarely hears them played in live concerts. We do get them on discs. The other sonata that one hears is the second, with its familiar movement that the composer later adopted for use in his alluring first symphony, Winter Dreams. This third is like that second, but different. Again, Tchaikovsky liked it somewhat, then didn't like it all that much. Only a live performance at Tchaikovsky's home by famous friend and mentor, Anton Rubinstein, convinced the composer that something could be done by playing it in public, after all. Still. The closest we are going to get to public performance in either piano sonata is probably going to be through recordings, not concerts.

The sonata is keyboard savvy, sprawling, rich with musical ideas that do not catch fire for mysterious reasons of performance in most cases. Tchaikovsky's way with the sonata and the piano is reminiscent of Schumann in his piano sonatas, and we all know how often we hear those played in live concerts. Settle in for two large-boned and melodious, sonorous first movements (Moderato e risoluto, Andante), followed by a quick, short scherzo (giocoso), and concluded by a live, romantic allegro (vivace). Primakov's sense of grand gesture is big, but never harsh sounding. He voices those opening chords in the first movement with symphonic sweep, and you can heard where the chords are going. Then we get lots of shifting harmonies, and snatches of singing melody, through to the end, framed by the chord motif. What risks being empty Romantic piano note-spinning, instead conveys a sense of procession, drama martially framed and contrasted with personal song. The Lisztian manners in some of the drama are laid out well by Primakov, yet he never falls completely into flash for its own sake. Despite the toned down rubato, he captures a fine sense of breathing the music in paragraphs, building to a whole sense of each movement. His approach serves well in the slow movement, Andante. The composer gets quite a bit more philosophical than we might have expected, in this slow movement. Song passages evoke textured harmony in musing reflection. Repeated notes add touches of ostinato and insistence. The short scherzo is relaxed, upbeat, and touched deeply with balletic gracefulness. Although in sonata-form, the concluding movement Finale is more athletic than intellectual. It has moments of big-hearted song, declaiming. Faster passages wind up the relaxed energies of the scherzo, using new materials. The music ebbs and flows, building to a rhetorical climax, followed by a surprise, valedictory coda involving the main theme.

Primakov makes about as fine a musical case for the neglected third piano sonata as seems possible. His way with The Seasons is charming, and goes deeper than many. I cannot help thinking that this whole disc was a labor of love - Tchaikovsky's love for music, love for the piano, and thanks to the engineers, a hidden love for the recording arts that get out of the way and let the music shine through.

Five stars, by my ears. Watch out for Primakov. Check out his other discs.