MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Tchaikovsky: 18 Pieces Op 72

Editor's Choice Gramophone Magazine July 2005

Gramophone Magazine Award Finalist 2005 - Instrumental

Rosette Recording Penguin Stereo Guide

"Mikhail Pletnev has always shown tremendous sympathy for the music of Tchaikovsky: as a conductor he's made some very fine symphonic recordings, but it's the pianist Pletnev whose devotion to the composer's cause is most gratifying. He plays these rarely encountered works with his customary flair, imbuing every note with real passion and understanding. In the course of this live Zurich recording, Pletnev brings these 18 miniatures vividly to life."
(Gramophone)

Five Stars (Instrumental choice of the Month) BBC Music (July 05)

Mikhail Pletnev plays Tchaikovsky's rarely played and recorded last piano cycle. It is a phantastic live recording not only for lovers and connoisseurs.

Pletnev: "I would call it a diary, a musical diary." It is a light, easy, aphoristic, positive romantic recording with dance characters.

Mikhail Pletnev is known for his dedication to the Russian repertoire. Given the general lack of appreciation of Tchaikovsky's piano music, the fact that a musician of Pletnev's stature takes it seriously is significant.

This CD is a live recording containing the rarely-played 18 pieces for solo piano op. 72 of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and as an encore Chopin's beautifully melancholic Nocturne No. 20 in C-sharp minor

Tchaikovsky wrote these 18 pieces - music of rich personality, charm and soul - in the last year of his life. Each piece carries a dedication, and each has more than a touch of Tchaikovsky's genius - a characteristic turn of phrase or modulation, and an expressive charge.

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Everyone plays Tchaikovsky's B flat minor Piano Concerto, and a few play the great G major Sonata or his cycle The Seasons. Only a handful of pianists tackle the Russian composer's entire, and by no means small, piano œuvre - among them Mikhail Pletnev. "I love Tchaikovsky. I love everything by him. When you love something, whether it's music or a woman, then you love everything ... Tchaikovsky is always Tchaikovsky. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't play this music any more."

Opus 72 consists of 18 miniatures, which all have titles (French or, less frequently, Italian). "Naturally the descriptive names all stem from the composer himself", Pletnev explains. "They're part and parcel of Romantic music. Think of Schumann - Schumann was the most important model for Tchaikovsky's piano music." The ninth piece is actually called "Un poco di Schumann" and can be understood as a deep bow to the German composer. Hermann Laroche, one of Tchaikovsky's closest friends and a fellow student at the conservatories of St. Petersburg and Moscow, reports that they often played Schumann's piano works, including four-hand reductions of his symphonies and his opera Genoveva. There's another "dedication" in this set of pieces by Tchaikovsky: No.15, a mazurka subtitled "Un poco di Chopin". But here Pletnev finds only superficial connections between the composers. And so it may only have been a momentary whim that led the pianist to offer a Chopin encore following this performance of Tchaikovsky's cycle, recorded live in Zurich's Tonhalle.

Opus 72 gathers together a wealth of brief impressions, each barely five minutes long. It even finds room for the fragment of another, never-completed work. The "Scherzo-fantaisie", No. 10, originally was part of the draft of a symphony in E flat, whose opening section then mutated into the single-movement Third Piano Concerto. Pletnev has no problem with the aphoristic quality of the whole cycle. "These pieces are beautiful music. You're confronted with the same problem when you play the Chopin Preludes: seeking and finding unity in the diversity."

The 18 Pieces for piano op. 72 are among Tchaikovsky's final works and his very last composition for solo piano. "All of Tchaikovsky is here", declares Pletnev with wholehearted conviction. "Not only folk and ballet influences are reflected in it, as often maintained, but a great deal more. I would call this a diary, a musical diary - filled with ideas and associations, then turning to thoughts about friends or to simple melodies that might occur to one while out walking." The dozen and a half pieces all date from 1893, the year of Tchaikovsky's death. Is it a last work, perhaps even a musical farewell? Pletnev doesn't think so: "One hardly senses that, or at most only peripherally. It isn't music of mourning. The saddest piece is 'Chant élégiaque', and that's in the major. Every great composer deals with dying, with death, and by no means only as an old man!"

Tchaikovsky himself seems not to have held a particularly high opinion of his Opus72. "These pieces are unripe and unimportant", he wrote during their composition to his nephew Bobik; "I'm producing them for money". A few days later he sounded more reconciled to the project: "I'm continuing to turn out these musical pancakes. Funny thing: the more I do it, the more I enjoy it, and the easier I find the work." Pletnev would defend Tchaikovsky against his, the composer's, own scepticism. In particular, he refuses to accept the charge that certain sections (especially in "Tendres reproches", "Méditation" and "Echo rustique") are salonlike, a mixture of intimacy and sentimentality. "All piano music not intended for the large concert hall belongs in the salon. I don't see anything pejorative in that. Schubert and Chopin wrote exclusively for the salon."