Piano Concerto No.2 in G major, Op.44

The world has been unkind to Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto. The worst offenders were the pianist Alexander Siloti, a pupil and friend, and Tchaikovsky’s publisher Jurgenson. Even though he was well aware of the composer’s objections to what he was doing, Siloti was responsible for carrying out the radical and much abbreviated revision which Jurgenson, who had sided with Tchaikovsky against Siloti’s offensive in the composer’s lifetime, published four years after his death. It was in this form - spuriously described as a “new edition, revised and reduced according to the composer’s instructions by A. Siloti” - that the work came to be known to the world at large. And it was in that form that it failed to find favour. Happily, the Siloti edition is now thoroughly discredited and Tchaikovsky’s original score is slowly finding its due place in the repertoire.

It is true that Second Piano Concerto in G major will never be as popular as the First in B flat minor. It is also true that Tchaikovsky began work on it not in a fit of inspiration but in an effort to escape from boredom when he was staying at his sister’s estate at Kamenka in October 1879. But, whatever the unpromising origins of the work, Tchaikovsky was quite happy with it when he completed it six months later. It was only when he first heard it in Moscow in May 1882 - five months after a performance in New York by the British pianist Madeleine Schiller - that Tchaikovsky decided it was rather too long and made a few cuts in the first two movements. The composer’s cuts, unlike Siloti’s excisions, are so short that it makes little difference whether they are observed or not.

According to no less an authority than David Brown, author of the monumental four-volume biography of the composer, the opening theme of the Allegro brillante “suggests Schumann rather than Tchaikovsky.” Though certainly not the most characteristic example of Tchaikovsky’s thematic invention, the first subject reveals its Russian (rather than German) identity in the orchestral passage immediately after the first solo entry. As soon as the melodic interest passes to flute over piano arpeggios the composer’s identity is just as clear. As for the second subject, introduced by passionate interjections on clarinet and horn and extended by tenderly melodious reflections on the piano, it is not very far from the emotional world of Eugene Onegin. In a heroic effort to reconcile the dynamic and lyrical elements represented by the two main themes, Tchaikovsky crowns the development section with a cadenza remarkable not only for its creative stamina but also for the percussive quality of the piano writing.

While Siloti found it difficult to accept a cadenza at this unconventionally early point in the Allegro brillante, he was even less keen on the starring roles awarded to solo violin and cello in the Andante non troppo. It is true that the pianist is upstaged here but, after a first movement of such extravagantly energetic keyboard virtuosity, Tchaikovsky was surely right in feeling that this was the time and place for intimate string melody - if not, perhaps, for an extended violin and cello cadenza such as that which occurs at the end of the quicker middle section. Anyway, before the end of the movement the piano has a cadenza too, short and curiously violin-like though it is.

Both the last two movements of the Second Piano Concerto were written during a stay in Paris in the last two months of 1879. So it might not be too fanciful to detect something Parisian in the glittering style of the piano writing - one thinks of a virtuoso composer-pianist like Litolf - in parts of the Allegro con fuoco. The main theme itself is clearly Russian in conception. So is the second theme, as a folky horn counterpoint duly enters to confirm. It is in the brilliantly decorative treatment of the material that, just as in his ballet scores, Tchaikovsky seems to have found inspiration in stylish Parisian sources. The witty way in which the coda is twice withheld by pauses might almost have been inspired by Saint-Saëns.

Gerald Larner ©2005