Con Fuoco: Fresh Ears on Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto 1

 

My parents' record collection was comically small and scattershot, at least compared to the one I would later amass (then dissolve into digital form and now, increasingly, into the cloud). A fair number of LPs I found in the built-in storage shelves of their giant hi-fi system seem to have been giveaways (in the vein of the Firestone Christmas collections or this priceless compilation) or seldom-played record-club acquisitions, which accounted for a handful of classical warhorses: this Kostelanetz ballet collection, a couple of essential Bruno Walter greats, the very formative Levant Plays Gershwin.

It's also how I first heard Tchaikovsky's hot mess of a Piano Concerto 1, in a version by Conrad Hansen and conductor William Mengelberg (which I've just learned, with a bit of a chill, was recorded in Berlin in 1940). It's a work as easy to love as it is to make fun of—all the whipped-into-a-frenzy orchestration, slathered over with syrupy strings, all those crashing piano octaves screaming "drama!" But much as I discovered, after several listens, that my favorite moment of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 is in fact the last 30 seconds or so of its third movement cracking open into to its crashing fourth, I found that the section of the Tchaikovsky that lit my imagination was the 16th-note chase that kicks in around the 12:42 mark below:
There's a lot of this nervy 16th-note action buzzing throughout the piece, when it's not booming or swooning or frowning, or dropping delicate tunes like the Faure-worthy beauty that lights up the concerto's second movement—though even there a beehive of scherzando briefly invades the tranquility. This relentless pulse isn't just present in the 4/4 sections, as in the stretch notated above, but in the concerto's otherwise predominant triple meters. At some points it's even got a Jaws-like bite (see 5:35 in the video), and even when Tchaikovksy tries to domesticate it, to get it to join in counterpoint with the piece's more lilting themes, it won't be tamed, its anxious rhythm soon stirring the piece back up into Big Drama (check the passage beginning at 16:22).  

Much has been written about the piece's seeming thematic disorganization, and not just the way that famous opening tune never returns. And indeed there are moments in this concerto that almost sound like tape splices, as if Tchaikovsky couldn't be bothered to craft transitions. But I think it is best heard as a lively conversation among disparate voices, even more than in most classical instrumental works: not just between the piano and orchestra but between these light and dark themes, the diversion and despair, and a certain bridge of sympathy between them.

Listened to as a dialogue it's almost possible to script parts of it. From about 8:00 to 8:43, for instance, the piano enacts a sort of melodramatic, attenuated death scene...and the orchestra, after taking a breath, obliviously breezes in with a major key theme, as if nothing has happened, a high flute part enacting a sort of fulsome "everything's okay" smile. But then, as the orchestra brushes itself off and begins a dance, around 9:40, it starts to work itself up into a dramatic climax of its own, until by 10:20 it's snagged in a swirl and the 16th notes are swarming. When the piano reenters, mimicking the orchestra's fury, you can almost hear it say, "I told you so!"

There are many other treasures here, including the mazurka-like folk melody with a seemingly shifting downbeat that powers the final movement. And there's a kind of emotional logic to the whole thing that transcends the "rules" of formal musical development. Its sound and fury signify plenty, and I'd say its power derives less from its towering chords and big tunes than from the relentless electrical pulse that whirs through it.