Piano Concerto No.3 in E flat major, Op.75

Tchaikovsky didn’t really know what to do with it. In May 1892 he had started working on a Symphony in E flat - it would have been his sixth - and by November he had got as far as orchestrating the first movement and sketching the other three. But then, only a month later, convinced that there was “nothing remotely interesting or attractive about it,” he decided to “throw it away and forget about it.” Or so he told his nephew Bob Davidov.

In fact, although his Sixth Symphony was to be a quite different work in B minor (the “Pathétique”), he did not discard his Symphony in E flat. He had a better idea, which was to transform three of the four movements into a Piano Concerto (the other he would recycle as the Scherzo-fantaisie of his Eighteen Pieces for piano, Op.70). Then in July 1893, having converted the first movement of the Symphony into the Allegro brillante first movement of the new Piano Concerto, he decided that the piece was quite long enough as it was and that he would leave it at that. But he changed his mind yet again and in the three months before his death he all but completed the task of rewriting the second and fourth movements of the Symphony as the Andante and Finale of the Concerto.

With so much material available after the composer’s death, his trusted friend Sergey Taneyev had little difficulty in finishing off those two movements and preparing them for publication (as the Andante and Finale, Op.79) in 1897. It is significant, however, that while it would be quite possible and not entirely unauthentic to attach the Andante and the Finale to the Allegro brillante and so present a three-movement Piano Concerto No.3 in E flat, few pianists have ever risked it. The Andante is attractive enough but the Finale is disappointing and anyway, as Tchaikovsky had once suspected, the Allegro brillante is complete in itself. It just happens to be a very satisfactory example of a single-movement construction incorporating slow-movement and scherzo elements substantial enough to add up to something not far short of a three-movement effect.

Another impressive, though uncharacteristic, aspect of the work is that much of it is based on one interval - the falling major third that is pronounced twice at the start of the theme outlined by the bassoon in the opening bars. The motif does not always appear with exactly the same interval but its two-note rhythm and its downwards inflection are identifiable everywhere. They are emphatically reiterated on the entry of the piano with its definitive presentation of the bassoon theme as the first subject. They are present too, though the interval is now expanded to a sixth, when the tempo slows down and the soloist turns to the melodious second subject (the slow-movement element) in G major.

If the basic motif is not a prominent part of the percussive scherzo-like material introduced by the piano at a suddenly quicker tempo towards the end of the exposition, it reappears in all kinds of dramatic and lyrical manifestations in the central development section. The cadenza, which is for the most part a bravura treatment of the second subject, serves both as additional development and as a direct link to the recapitulation. Far from being an automatic repeat of the exposition, this last section is brilliantly engineered to drive straight through the scherzo material into a vivacissimo coda obsessively motivated by the basic motif of the work.

Gerald Larner©

A writer and critic associated mainly with The Times, Gerald Larner is the author of a book on Ravel and of studies of Chopin, Chabrier and Tchaikovsky.