Piano Concerto No. 1 (Tchaikovsky)

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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, op. 23, was composed in November 1874 - February 1875 at the instigation of piano virtuoso Nikolai Rubinstein, director of the Moscow Conservatory. It was revised in the summer of 1879 and again in December 1888. The work is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, strings, and solo piano.

History

Rubinstein, the work's dedicatee, was originally also to be its first performer. However, when at Christmas in 1874 Tchaikovsky proudly showed the work to Rubinstein and two other musical friends, he met with bitter disappointment. After they had given it a first play-through, Rubinstein hastily dismissed the piano concerto as "banal, clumsy and incompetently written" as well as "poorly composed and unplayable." He then asked Tchaikovsky to undertake a substantial reworking of it in accordance with his own wishes. The proud composer, however, did not oblige and responded by altering his original dedication, so that the soloist on the occasion of the concerto's first performance – on October 25, 1875 in Boston, conducted by Benjamin Johnson Lang – was Hans von Bülow, celebrated German pianist and conductor and an admirer of Tchaikovsky's music. Bülow was very excited by this new piece and the Russian premiere took place just one week later in Saint Petersburg, with the Russian pianist Gustav Kross and Czech conductor Eduard Nápravník. The piano soloist in the Moscow premiere in 1875 was Sergei Taneyev.

Arrangement

The concerto follows the traditional form of three movements:

Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso - Allegro con spirito
Andantino simplice - Prestissimo
Allegro con fuoco

The concerto is markedly symphonic in character and differs considerably from the more musically conservative and outwardly virtuoso type of concerto that was then widely popular in Russia, yet the technical demand placed upon the pianist remains considerable. There are both passages in which one can not maintain contact with the keyboard (octaves in rapid succession for sustained periods of time are an example), as well as the style more common of keyboard music, a note arrangement where the hands of the performer need never leave the keyboard, such as in a Beethoven piano sonata. However, even the latter are formidable due to speed and awkward note arrangement. Further technical demands are placed on the performer, in keeping with the overall monumental nature of the work, and on account of the need to allow the piano to dominate over the orchestra in some passages.

The well-known theme of the moving introductory section to the first movement is based on a melody that Tchaikovsky heard performed by blind beggar-musicians at a market in Kamenka, near Kiev in the Ukraine. This, the best-known passage in the entire concerto, is notable also on account of its formal independence of the movement as a whole. Despite its very substantial nature, once it has been heard twice Tchaikovsky does not return to the material again.

Trivia

Also arranged for two pianos by Tchaikovsky, December 1874; revised December 1888.
Van Cliburn won the First International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1957 with this piece, much to the astonishment of people worldwide, as he was an American competing in Moscow at the height of the Cold War.

This article is a compilation of the data posted at: [Tchaikowsky Page]

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