LISTEN TO TCHAIKOVSKY, STRIPPED DOWN TO HIS INTENTIONS

By DAVID ALLEN

Think you know Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1? Think again.

It’s one of the most popular pieces in the repertoire. But the pianist Kirill Gerstein, as inquisitive as he is talented, argues that what we commonly hear is an overly ostentatious misrepresentation, tarted up after Tchaikovsky’s death.

From Thursday through Feb. 7 with the New York Philharmonic, Mr. Gerstein plays a new critical edition, more delicate and less grandiose. Based on an 1879 version, it has among its sources Tchaikovsky’s own conducting score, which he used in a St. Petersburg concert nine days before his death in 1893. It is therefore closer to the music performed at Carnegie Hall’s opening week in 1891 than anything heard by New Yorkers since. Here are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Gerstein.

Most music lovers would be surprised to hear that such a well-known work isn’t quite what we think it is.

I liken it to those iconic paintings that go to a museum restoration shop. It’s like in a portrait: a wrinkle here, no wrinkle there, an eyebrow tilted in a slightly different way. For anyone who has anxiety, it’s still very much the Tchaikovsky concerto we love, but it perhaps has a different facial expression than we are used to.

How did the usual edition come about?

There’s a tragedy, especially in Russian culture, of geniuses surrounded by less talented well-wishers. Tchaikovsky was one of those, where certain people in his circle — in this case Alexander Siloti, his student and an uncle of Rachmaninoff — thought they knew better. Siloti had been in Europe and studied with Liszt. His tendency toward the superficially brilliant, and some of the traits of 19th-century pianism that are less noble than the tradition generally is in its best manifestations, resulted in these posthumous editorial changes.

Some people like to eat organic food — that’s Tchaikovsky’s version — and some people like to eat everything with sprinkles of MSG. That’s fine, as long as you know that what you’re sprinkling is monosodium glutamate. So if one wants to play Tchaikovsky-Siloti, do that. I think it’s better to do what the composer himself wrote.

Do these changes fundamentally alter the character of the piece, or are they just refinements?

A bit of both. When you take it all together, there are maybe four, five significant changes and about 150, 160 minor discrepancies of articulation and dynamic indications in various orchestra parts, as well as in the piano part.

What it suggests is a fresh look at how the piece is interpreted. Some skeptic might say that the percentage of the notes that are different is probably less than 1 percent, so what’s the big deal? It gives us a chance to revisit something for sincere musical interest, something that is so often relegated to being an old war horse, and frankly not taken seriously enough because the criticism is that it’s so bombastic. It may be better than we are used to. I do find that in all the cases where there is a discrepancy, what the composer wrote is more suitable and fitting to the musical content, to the general poetry of the piece.

Perhaps the most shocking thing is that the famous opening chords are now rolled.

Absolutely. When you enter this great building, if we compare it to a building, not through this pompous entrance but with something clearly more lyrical and less blaring, it obviously casts a different shadow on what follows.

What’s interesting is that so many other things come into focus. Finally the dynamics that Tchaikovsky indicates in the orchestral melody make sense. Usually the pianist enters with these chords as powerfully as he can, to show that he’s got the goods, and the orchestra immediately responds. It’s like a Cold War escalates in the first measures. Now, since the chords are rolled and arpeggiated, one can arpeggiate quicker or slower, and help the flow of the melody in a much more flexible style than what one hears when these chords are symmetrically crashing.

In the usual version, I was always surprised when these big crashing chords suddenly do switch into arpeggios a few measures later. Was he not a good enough composer that he couldn’t figure out how to continue with these block chords, if that’s what he wanted? Years later, I find out that that’s where the editor made the cut back to Tchaikovsky’s own version.

Is there another major change you would pick out?

The one that’s obvious is that in the third movement there is this middle section. We have about 45 seconds of usually unheard music — incidentally, very adventurous harmonically and contrapuntally.

My feeling has always been that it seems like an odd decision, that Tchaikovsky goes into this different mood, and stays in it for 20 seconds, and then he’s back to the previous mood. But it turns out this is a section that’s longer, and so we’re in this mood longer. The third movement really then acquires a more balanced structure.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/arts/music/listen-to-kirill-gerstein-tchaikovsky-stripped-down-to-his-intentions.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FClassical%20Music&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection&_r=0