Dumka in E minor Op.59 (1886)

Nocturne in C sharp minor Op. 19 No.4 (1873)

Considering Tchaikovsky’s immense popularity in every other area of the repertoire, it is surprising how rarely we get to hear his piano music. True, he did not write as well for solo piano as, say, Balakirev, whose Islamey clearly outshines Tchaikovsky’s similarly rhapsodic Dumka as a virtuoso piece, but that is no reason to neglect so much music based on the same kind of material and illuminated by the same personality as some of the most frequently performed of all concertos, symphonies and operas. Subtitled “a Russian rustic scene” and written between Manfred and the Fifth Symphony, Dumka is perhaps the most interesting of his piano compositions. The model seems to have been Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, except of course that its inspiration is Russian melody, the most characteristic example of which is the melancholy folk song that opens the work. The quicker middle section is based on a Russian dance of the kind familiar from Tchaikovsky’s ballet music and celebrated here in a variety of keyboard techniques, some of them more idiomatic than others but none as effective as the comparatively simple treatment of the lyrical episode at the heart of the piece. A Lisztian cadenza leads by way of a revival of the dance to a recall of the opening folk song and an over-kill ending.

The Nocturne in C sharp minor is based on a similar contrast of material but in a far more intimate and correspondingly more convincing manner. While it obviously owes more than a little to Chopin, it is an undeniably personal inspiration exquisitely written in purely pianistic terms.