https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520268067/on-russian-music
There is a really "hot" article in Richard Taruskin's highly recommendable book "On Russian Music", exposing the "musicologist's frauds" connected to that 1998 3CD Schwann box "Tchaikovsky - The Four Piano Concertos etc. Unabridged Original Versions". I remember we mentioned it in one of our earlier postings. Taruskin also criticizes conductor Fedoseyev in general - and also the booklet authors.
This is an incredible source and contribution - a really challenging and exciting book. I discover it only now and, I must say, it's about time such discussable enterprises are unveiled. In another chapter, Taruskin also questions many statements in Davis Brown's Tchaikovsky biography (including the eternal discussions on the composer's real death). The book contains 36 articles and has 407 pages.
Anyone in this forum wanting to know more, can write me a message. For copyright reasons I do not dare to reproduce this 12-page article in here.
I bought that boxset.....what was the fraud?
@christopher: this can be found out in the mentioned article. It would need a lot of time to explain everything in here - and there is no better authority than the author.
It'd be good to know the bare bones, though...
I'm assuming this is the set concerned:
(http://andrej-hoteev.com/onewebstatic/b464acaeb3-Andrej%20Hoteev%20%20KOCH%20Schwann_0003.jpg)
https://www.amazon.com/Tchaikovsky-Piano-Concertos-Bohemian-Melodies/dp/B00000G4MN (https://www.amazon.com/Tchaikovsky-Piano-Concertos-Bohemian-Melodies/dp/B00000G4MN)
...from the Amazon blurb:
You can almost hear the sound of axes grinding behind this music. If you have the patience to read all four booklets accompanying this three-disc set, you will learn that many villains have conspired to prevent us from hearing Tchaikovsky's music as he wrote it (including his faithful pupil Sergei Taneyev, who orchestrated the last two movements of the Third Piano Concerto.) As for the "Unabridged Original Version" offered here, careful listening and reading reveal that three small passages have been "restored" to the First and Second Concertos--nothing of any consequence. The reason they last so long (40 minutes for the First, 52 and a half for the Second) is that Hoteev feels virtuosity doesn't suit Tchaikovsky's music. His slow tempos do change the emphasis of the music toward lyricism, although many listeners may find they make the concertos interminable. You can debate forever Tchaikovsky's contribution to Bohemian Melodies, which first appeared as the work of Sophie Menter. (Liszt also helped out with this piece; another version is included in Hyperion's Liszt Edition.) Its main function here is to demonstrate that Hoteev can play with animation and dash when he chooses to. The set concludes with a purported 1890 cylinder recording of the voices of several Russian musicians, including Tchaikovsky--maybe, although it does come with suspiciously complete details, including identification of every voice (how did they know?) and a transcription and translation. --Leslie Gerber
If you follow this link to Richard Taruskin's book, click on the image of the book and then type in 'Fedoseyev' to search inside the book, you'll discover the story Adriano is talking about:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russian-Music-Richard-Taruskin/dp/0520268067/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536751595&sr=1-1&keywords=On+Russian+Music#reader_0520268067 (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russian-Music-Richard-Taruskin/dp/0520268067/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536751595&sr=1-1&keywords=On+Russian+Music#reader_0520268067)
Oh thanks, Alan, I did not know about the possibility of getting "into the book" like this! I offered a scan via Mediafire to persons contacting me - so this becomes unnecessary.
The single CD booklets have liner notes by Eckhard van der Hoogen, who also writes for cpo. I think he will be remembered, not only as very serious, painfully researching musicologist, but also for writing some of the longest booklets in CD history...
Dr. E V D Hoogen along with the faithful Susan Marie Praeder, will also be remembered for the migraines suffered by the unsuspecting many who had to go through the CPO booklets of lesser known composers.
I actually should not criticise EVH too loudly, since some of my Fritz Brun analyses are also quite long. But compared to him, I generally remain on earthbound reality and use a more simple style - since I am not a musicologist :-)
It appears at this time that you can link to the original New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/28/arts/music-russian-originals-de-and-re-edited.html) concerning this as well as the book itself in Google books (https://books.google.com/books?id=76gwDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=fedoseyev+tchaikovsky+taruskin&source=bl&ots=oM8Vzy0ztV&sig=YufzigRF6DFsAXX9lIR9jJcf7pI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifraXluLXdAhUClawKHWYDClUQ6AEwBHoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=fedoseyev%20tchaikovsky%20taruskin&f=false).
I have not seen this review before, but my thoughts:
A) Richard Taruskin is a well known skeptic on "historically accurate" performances and the "historical accuracy" claims seems the beef of the argument.
B) Though I am far from an academic expert on this sort of thing, I personally share some of the skepticism on just how "historically accurate" you can get. Although I'm sure musicologists try their best, in the end, it is my view that some sort of interpretation and extrapolation will have to be made due to details lost in the passage of time, and the messiness history often is.
C) The New York Times review Mr. Taruskin wrote nonetheless throws around a few details (such as an IMHO unnecessary slights on the folk music background of Mr. Fedoseyev, and overplaying antisemitism on "the Bruckner problem") that in my opinion undermine his core arguments with a whiff of over-pompous arrogance.
I agree with you, soundwave106, as far as the "boulevard" details of Taruskin's article re concerned - but at the same time I feel satisfied, since I knew two Russian musicians who had been fired by Fedo: I know also that his wife (and agent) is well connected and that she practically "made him". I witnessed three operas Fedoseyev was invited to conduct in Zurich (Verdi's Otello, Massenet's Don Quichotte and Dvorak's Rusalka), revealing that he had no idea of this kind of repertoire and that he came over unprepared. But this miscasting was a mistake by Alexander Pereira - but we all knew what was going to happen... It was painful for all of us involved (singers and players) to have him conducting these pieces. Imagine Ruggero Raimondi (as Jago and as Don Quichotte) having to deal with such unserious musicianship. As far as the Russain repertoire is concerned (some of which he also conducted in Zurich), Fedo seems having been experienced enough - if not always really inspired :-)
Has anyone here actually listened to the recordings and what are "your" opinions on these performances?
I definitely have, FBerwald :-)
Not only I was shocked - and mainly bored. I am sure with another conductor it would have brought to better results.
Hoteev is an excellent pianist for Russian repertoire. There is also a CD with "pure" music by Mussorgsky: "Pictures at an Exhibition" and "Songs and Dances of Death", in which he accompanies Elena Pankratova.
https://www.amazon.de/Pure-Mussorgsky-Andrej-Hoteev/dp/B00LVANGHW/ref=sr_1_1?s=music-classical&ie=UTF8&qid=1536759663&sr=1-1&keywords=hoteev+mussorgsky
He also recorded Wagner's complete songs and piano works on the Hänssler Classics label.
https://www.amazon.de/Declarations-Love-Andrei-Hoteev/dp/B0744QJHL7
His album of Russian songs with Anja Silia (apparently her sole song recital album) is also worth mentioning...
https://www.amazon.de/Russian-Songs-Anja-Silja/dp/B002BANC8Y/ref=sr_1_2?s=music-classical&ie=UTF8&qid=1536759663&sr=1-2&keywords=hoteev+mussorgsky
Many thanks for all this - very interesting. I'm glad to have finally read about these Hoteev recordings: I spilled tea on the booklet on the day it arrived 10+ years ago and have never since been able to open it without tearing the paper and rending the text illegible!
Christopher, shall I scan the English translation (pages 12-20) of the booklet and put them on Mediadfire for download? No need to scan also the following photo albums, I suppose...
Quote from: hadrianus on Thursday 13 September 2018, 16:37
Christopher, shall I scan the English translation (pages 12-20) of the booklet and put them on Mediadfire for download? No need to scan also the following photo albums, I suppose...
Hadrianus - that is incredibly kind, thank you very much!
There it is:
The culprits call their project "Tchaikovsky's Piano Concertos for the Third Millennium"! Oh dear...
http://www.mediafire.com/file/99jlbnvno48tt3g/Tchaikovsky+-+Work+for+Piano+and+Orchestra+-+Booklet.pdf
This also may be interesting:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/03/09/real-tchaikovsky/
http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Piano_Concerto_No._1
http://www.broadstreetreview.com/music/the-trouble-with-tchaikovskys-piano-concerto-no.-1-in-b-flat-minor#
Here is the score of the first edition:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/721ppzagpglt7ui/TCHAIKOVSKY+-+Piano+Concerto+1st+ed..pdf
In 1987, pianist Jerome Lowenthal recorded this 1875 version with the LSO, conducted by Sergiu Comissiona. It's available - with Lowenthal's recordings of Tchaikovsky's Concertos No. 2 and 3 and the Concert Fantasy (with its horrible alternate ending as a bonus) - on an exciting 2009 2CD reissue album by the Bridge label. Their first issues had been published by Arabesque records.
Ok. Please do not link directly to IMSLP PDFs, in part because they are not permalinks, for other reasons as well. It's polite practice to link to the workpage the PDF is on (inthiscase here (https://imslp.org/wiki/Piano_Concerto_No.1,_Op.23_(Tchaikovsky,_Pyotr)) where it can be found under the full scores, version "C", file #105370, scanned by/mirrored from the Russian National Library (RUS-Mrg) in mid-2011.
Sorry for not knowing this, eschiss1. But I could not find a link with a file #105370 , so I have corrected by quoting the list of the versions.
Interestingly, it looks as this is the very score I was allowed to consult at the Moscow (dependance building across the street of the) Lenin Library in the 1990s :-)
hrm. does searching (^F or command-F) for 105370 while on the page i linked-to help at all
I made another correction in my yesterday's message of 13:03 hrs :-)
Quote from: hadrianus on Friday 14 September 2018, 13:03
There it is:
The culprits call their project "Tchaikovsky's Piano Concertos for the Third Millennium"! Oh dear...
http://www.mediafire.com/file/99jlbnvno48tt3g/Tchaikovsky+-+Work+for+Piano+and+Orchestra+-+Booklet.pdf
Thank you SO much for this Hadrianus, it is much appreciated. And I hope and am sure others are grateful to you for all this info.
My pleasure, Christopher :)
Hanssler has re-issued the Koch Schwann recording of Hoteev's traversal of the Tchaikovsky piano concertos and Concert Fantasy. (https://media1.jpc.de/image/w400/front/0/0881488200836.jpg)
It's a mixed bag. The familiar First Concerto is given in the 1890 revision for the first two movements and the 1875 original for the last. The principle difference is that the latter includes a few developmental bars that the authors claim restores the proper sonata-allegro form to the movement, but I don't find it an improvement. Tchaikovsky was right to cut it out. If the overall performance is a bit slower than normal, it is only slightly so, and allows the work a sort of grandeur not heard in the usual traversal.
The Second Concerto comes off most conventionally. Again, a bit slower than normal, which allows both for the aforementioned grandeur and also to give a more delicate, almost Chopinesque quality to the secondary material of the first movement. Beyond this, it could pass as a typical performance of the original, non-Siloti version.
The Third Concerto is the least successful performance. Tempos in the first movement are at first grindingly slow, though this improves with time. Still, the movement persistently drags; the many opportunities for drama that others exploit are lost. The second movement, however, comes off just fine. The finale is somewhere in between, but really could have used a bit more drive.
The Concert Fantasy comes off best in the relaxed approach adopted by the performers. Many of the melodies take on a different character, at times more Russian sounding (in the folk-like material) and at others more Chopinesque (in the more delicate material), just as in the Second Concerto.
The notes are still conspiratorial to an absurd degree, full of misleading or downright inaccurate statements. They suggest that in 1998 there was only one recording of the original Second Concerto, but I well remember that by that time the Siloti version had fallen into disrepute and most newer performances and recordings were of the original. The author claims this on the basis that the available recordings were not billed as "original version" and therefore must be the Siloti, but even Ponti's 1974 recording of the original for Vox did not bill itself "original version". The author's assumption is just silly. He further suggests that conductors refused to program the original because the didn't want to pony up the costs of hiring two additional soloists, another absurdity since the big violin and cello solos in the second movement are played by the first desk players, not by guest artists.
Much is made of Taneyev's alleged suppression of the second and third movements of the concerto. Where all this crazy talk comes from I don't know, because Tchaikovsky himself wrote to another pianist, "As I wrote to you, my new Symphony is finished. I am now working on the scoring of my new concerto for our dear Diémer. When you see him, please tell him that when I proceeded to work on it, I realized that this concerto is of depressing and threatening length. Consequently I decided to leave only part one which in itself will constitute an entire concerto. The work will only improve the more since the last two parts were not worth very much." This was Tchaikovsky's decision, and while I think it a disastrous one, the blame for presenting to the world the oddly truncated work was his.
Tchaikovsky was a lousy judge of his own music. He thought the music for The Nutcracker bad, that the Fifth Symphony showed a precipitous decline in quality from the Fourth, and that Manfred was so bad that he asked his publisher to destroy it except for the first movement. He authorized disfiguring cuts in the Piano Trio, in which form I used to hear it when I was young, including the deletion of the entire development and recapitulation in the finale -- players used to play just the exposition then skip to the coda. Ugh! And yet he thought highly of the Second Concerto and even the Piano Sonata, a work very few love. Taneyev did us all a service by finishing the scoring of the Third Concerto and I wish more performers would reverse the composer's error by playing the Op. 75 and 79 together. But did we need all the conspiratorial fabrication that the notes to the recording still suggest?
Finally, I was re-reading Jeremey Norris's comments on the Third in his The Russian Piano Concerto and was almost amused by how much he truly hates (which is to say, hates) this piece, which he characterizes as having "...long stretches of unremittingly diatonic harmony [...], contrived counterpoint, rambling passages of pseudo-developmental intent [...], and [...] melodies of truly astonishing banality." Yikes. Whatever, Jerry, but I think it's a hoot.
For those of you who don't know Ponti's 1974 Prague recording of the First, Second, and Concert Fantasy, along with his 1970 Luxembourg recording of the Third, all re-issued on a Vox Box back in the early 90s, they are still hard to beat.
His self-doubt even hits his correspondence regarding his opera Eugene Onegin, which soon became among the most beloved, I believe, of Russian operas, and a particular favorite of the Tsar of the time besides.
Re the 3rd concerto, if it were Taneev who had suppressed the 2nd and 3rd movements, how is it they were published in an edition edited -by- him? How decidedly odd, yes.
"Tchaikovsky was a lousy judge of his own music. He thought the music for The Nutcracker bad, that the Fifth Symphony showed a precipitous decline in quality from the Fourth, and that Manfred was so bad that he asked his publisher to destroy it except for the first movement."
As an illustration of just how fickle Tchaikovsky could be, he initially lauded Manfred as the "best thing he ever wrote". I believe that the only of his own works he remained committed to was Francesca da Rimini.
I love all Tchaikovsky's symphonies for their melodies and thematic narratives....except the Manfred. I've tried and tried and tried but just find nothing to it. I can't express it better than that!