(program)
London ffrr Recording // Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) // Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Minor, Op. 23
The New Symphony Orchestra conducted by George Szell. Solo Pianist: Clifford Curzon
Piano Concerto No. 1:
Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso - Allegro con spirito
Andantino semplice - Prestissimo
Allegro con fuoco
So take your orchids
Elsewhere
Elsewhere
“” Cola, arlo parks
It turned out that my concerto was worthless and unplayable; passages were so fragmented, so clumsy, so badly written that they were beyond rescue; the work itself was bad, vulgar; in places I had stolen from other composers; only two or three pages were worth preserving; the rest must be thrown away or completely rewritten. “” tchaikovsky recounting pianist nikolai rubinstein’s commentary on this concerto
——tchaikovsky evidently decided against changing a single note in the work as recommended by rubinstein. written during a russian winter and premiered in another legendarily cold climate——boston——i put this Piano Concerto No.1 at the opposite end of chopin’s first piano concerto, as a sort of chopin of the north. it’s been almost a year since the last time this concerto was on this blog. i don’t recall it being this good, perhaps that owes to this livelier recording, or an increased sensibility after a month of listening folk songs that tchaikovsky turned into his main theme. the treadmill of little but unforgettable melodies that populate the music of tchaikovsky is the subject of my fascination here. take for example the comparison between the main theme of the first movement of his violin concerto and the second theme of the third movement of this piano concerto; so different from each other that the two might very well form an anthem of a nation of their own——a testament to tchaikovsky’s inventiveness, to the musicality of russian folk melodies they’re based on, and to the movement in music that was spearheaded half-a-century before tchaikovsky, by philosopher johann herder: that a nation’s music lies with the music of its peasant folk (Volkslied), not its art-music.
like the aforementioned theme of the violin concerto, the second (and main) theme of the Allegro con fuoco is a lyrical twirl that seems slightly foreign to the staccato procession of the movement thus far. the movement begins with a percussive proclamation in B flat minor——a throwback to the four hammering notes at the top of the first movement——which is based on a ukranian folk song. this opening segment dovetails, with prickly pizzicato and woodwind accompaniment, into a rehash of the same material by soloist. the brief passage is interrupted by the orchestra’s repetition of the first theme, this time in D flat major. a back-and-forth tossle of this theme ensues and reaches a climax that gives the soloist the last trailing word. out of this lull erupts the second theme on violins, based on a russian folk song called ‘I am Going To Tsar Gorod’:
‘Interior Jeløen Moss’ by Asta Nørregaard, 1898
I will go up, I will go up,
I will go up to Tsar-gorod.
I will shatter, I will shatter
With my lance I will shatter the wall.
this introduction is a mere tease as the orchestra returns back to the first theme, dotted rhythms slow down the pace for a brief respite before the tempo revs up to a crescendo and the orchestra reprises the first theme once more. the Tsar Gorod theme returns for a longer stretch, in E-flat, and the piano finally takes up the hint with it’s own full-throated rendition. a development sections features the piano switching back to the first theme, thereby increasing the tempo with scales and arpeggios. a combination of timpani rolls, dotted rhythms and a deep bellow on bass builds a crescendo up to the Tsar Gorod theme again. the soloist takes this as a cue into a crackling cadenza with double octaves, ending with a dramatic pause that brings the orchestra back in for the Tsar Gorod theme and the final stretch towards the finish line. a rushing tempo, glissando alongside double octaves, brings the concerto to its emphatic end.
(song of the week: Cola - arlo parks)
i’m obliged to begin with reference to that cursed song by one Lana Del Rey of the same name (‘My pussy tastes like pepsi-cola..’), though i much prefer this version by parks; a heck of a music video too, she’s very comfortable with the camera. it’s refreshing to see continuous shots in a pop video that are longer than two seconds——and her prolonged gaze, a levitating pressure. the twenty-year-old londoner is a poet and singer with a confessional style the likes of sylvia plath:
So take your orchids Elsewhere, Elsewhere.
I loved you to death,
And now i don’t really care
Cuz you’re running round over there...
‘elsewhere’——it’s for me the biggest word in the language...without it everything gets too small (and because of it, there are things that’ll always remain out of reach). i would have taken the cheap bait and named the song ‘Elsewhere’, but she’s obviously more a poet that i am and went instead with Cola——the cold, dark and sugary fizz of her ex-lover’s eyes, i imagine.
about half of the flowers i know were gleaned from plath’s poetry (indeed parks lists plath as one of her influences), and in plath’s poems these household flowers are revealed as not quite the innocent eye-candies they seem, their plush and penetrable features are recast as the snarling face of some dangerous animal: “They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat” (Tulips); “The red geraniums I know./ Friends, friends. They stink of armpits/ And the invovled maladies of autumn…” (Leaving Early). and then there’s the star-flower of her feverishly composed poem, Fever 103:
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
stare too long at an orchid and i get this unsettling feeling of a threat, as if a set of fangs could at any moment be discharged from the center of their many-curling lobes. albeit that’s a combination that i find pleasurable, at least conceptually, to imagine something so soft and orificial, endowed with a mean set of teeth. that combination is perhaps not too far from the one charles bukowski bleakly makes of love and pain, that we are in life resigned to our choice of only two options, either to be “mutilated by love or no love” (Love is A Dog From Hell). though i think the choice should be obvious, at least it is when i recall a similar observation that kyle dargan, american poet at large, makes in his poem ‘Capture Myopathy’:
...A man cannot flee
a threat he does not understand
without revealing he does not understand.
It calls for a cloak of poise. If men could
slow down, listen to their thumping
little animal hearts, they might realize
there are worse fates in life than
being gobbled up by a gorgeous predator.
“” kyle dargan, Honest Engine