|
 Alexander
Tcherepnin (left) is an intriguing figure in music. Son of
the famous conductor-composer Nikolai Tcherepnin (teacher of
Prokofiev), he was considered by his biographer Willi Reich to be a
"citizen of the musical world" - a description which you will find
rings true after listening to a few works of his. Like Prokofiev, he
was also a virtuoso pianist and premiered many of his own works, to
much acclaim.
The single movement Piano Concerto No.2
is a work that grows on you on repeated listening. The same
resemblance in terms of thematic material to Shostakovich exists
here, but Tcherepnin's way with the piano is totally different --
somewhat between a Prokofiev and a Rachmaninoff, if you can imagine
it. Writing a work out of one or two themes lasting the eighteen
minutes as this one does while varying them so that they don't
outlast their welcome is not as easy as it may sound, but Tcherepnin
manages this just fine, and rather cleverly at that. The work sounds
to me inherently virtuosic and full of vivacity in the solo part,
something which Ogawa chooses not to exploit -- this same reluctance
to indulge in virtuosity came to the fore during the pre-recording
concerts as well. I thought a less laid-back approach to the work
would have left a deeper immediate impression -- Tcherepnin was
after all a virtuoso in his own right. This might be the way the
"Russian school" of pianists would play it if they did -- I can
imagine some Russian piano competition-winner "rediscovering" this
work and popularizing it in future -- but what's wrong with some
full-blooded piano playing? Orchestra and soloist put up a solid
enough performance, but I think just that bit more of excitement
would go a long way to the advocacy of this work.
 Tcherepnin
lived in China and Japan for a long time, and much of the culture,
at the least the musical part of it, influenced him heavily. The
Fourth Piano Concerto is probably one of the best examples of this.
The piece is infused with pentatonic music that sounds thoroughly
Oriental, with Japanese-sounding passages in the first movement "Wu
Song Kills the Tiger" -- a famous Chinese tale of a brave man who
ventures up the mountain to kill the tiger that has been terrorizing
his village. The opening is somewhat reminiscent of the fairy-tale
atmosphere that is evoked in Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, but
Tcherepnin quickly establishes his own idiom, sounding rather like
Prokofiev here. The arrival of the tiger is heralded ominously by
low brass, while Wu Song's own theme is in a clear pentatonic --
much like Peter and his wolf, one might say. The coda of the first
movement is much like a grand procession. This movement could easily
be played as a stand-alone, so strong a sense of finality and
jubilation is there in its coda.
The second, slow movement is rather an exercise in chinoiserie
again, but Tcherepnin interrupts it each time with an
interpolation of a spiky, playful Western idiom with the Chinese.
For what it's worth, it sounds to me nothing like what Yang Kui
Fei's (to give the proper name again) love sacrifice should sound
like. It is however tuneful and quite charming.
The last movement "Road to Yunnan", the notes explain, expresses the
joy that one feels when travelling on a fine day on the south-west
Chinese province of Yunnan, and well it does too, except that it
sounds like the music is from a different place (Jiangnan).
Whichever the case, this is light and down-to-earth music, folk-like
and playful.
The three movements on the whole don't really go together, I feel,
except for the Chinese/pentatonic themes that bind them, but taken
on their own they are very successful and give the listener of how
the composer weaved the Chinese influences into his own writing.
Shui Lan and Ogawa work hand-in-glove here, and present a very
successful performance of the work, though once again that last bit
of playfulness is missing. Ogawa has a lot more to play here, and
she plays it well. This work should be attempted and played more
often!
Two overtures/orchestral works complete the disc -- the Symphonic
Prayer and Magna Mater. Magna Mater was his first purely orchestral
work and describes a ritual that occured in the cult of the Magna
Mater, or The Great Mother, thought of some as the oldest religion
in the world. The cult was very Amazonian, and men who wanted to
become part of the priesthood had to castrate themselves. The music
here is colorful, dissonant and rhythmic in a Sacre du Primtemps
way, orgiastic and estatic in the coda. I thought SSO and Shui
Lan could have been wilder, but it is still a very good recording.
Symphonic Prayer is marked Maestoso and to my ears has shades of Shostakovich
in many places,
even similar orchestration. It is very Russian and doesn't sound
prayer-like at all -- the middle section sounds militant and
combative. But it ends, full of hope after all the hurly-burly in
the middle. The BIS recording is natural and excellently balanced,
and Noriko Ogawa, Shui Lan and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra are
to be congratulated for a brave attempt at "new" music! Derek Lim
remembers the Tcherepnin concerts of a few years ago, not always
fondly :)
Interesting websites to go to from here:
The Tcherepnin
Society
http://www.tcherepnin.com/
The Cult of the Magna Mater
http://hem.bredband.net/arenamontanus/Mage/magna.html
Readers' Comments
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
If you wish to
Add a Comment to this article, please email your comments to classical@inkpot.com.
365:
12.12.1998 © Chia Han-Leon
All
original texts are copyrighted. Please seek permission from the
Classical Editor
if you wish to reproduce/quote Inkpot material.
|
