Tcherepnin Alexander

And here we have another winner in BIS's magnificent series of the symphonies and piano concertos of Alexander Tcherepnin. The music is marvelous, and the performances very good. To start with the two purely orchestral works, the Symphonic Prayer and the Magna mater are stylistically similar yet imaginative and written in a rather personal idiom. Both are based on chorale harmonies, but the music is nevertheless overall full of energy. No, there are no immediately memorable themes here, but both works are of the kind where you immediately appreciate every move and magnificently wrought detail…….

G.D @ Amazon.com

This programme demonstrates Russian-born Alexander Tcherepnin’s mastery of the miniature and the monumental, speaking to the heart from a basis in the Romantic tradition. From the cleverly written and spontaneously fresh works of his youth to the remarkable Sonata No 2 from 1961, each piece is a gold mine of astoundingly inventive and distinctively individual craftsmanship.

The famous Russian pianist-composer, who became an American citizen in 1958, was as well known in 1930s Paris as Stravinsky and heir to a number of Slav cultures in Europe and Asia. In the course of long visits, he also analysed the music of the Far East (China, Japan, Korea…), endeavouring to find a common language in the various folklores he discovered.

Bach showed that the cello can dance, but composers from Rossini to Shostakovich have favored it as an instrument of pensive reflection and brooding melancholy. The playful cover photo notwithstanding, SOLO features Yo-Yo Ma in five 20th century cello works of a serious nature, all with folk influence and all echoing at least a bit of the troubles of the times in which they were written.

Giorgio Koukl’s survey of Tcherepnin’s inventive piano music continues with two 1950s collections that reflect a synthesis of his earlier technical and expressive innovations—the virtuosic Eight Pieces and the beguiling Expressions. These two cycles bracket a varied group of scores, from the youthful Feuilles libres through the restrained lyricism of the Préludes, and the quirky modernism of the Intermezzo and Tanz, to the relaxed songfulness of the Etudes, written following a concert tour of the Far East.

After Tchaikovsky, but with Glazunov, and before Stravinsky and the rest, Nikolai Tcherepnin (1873-1945) made a not so quiet contribution to the continuing development of the Russian ballet. But he was quite an overshadowed figure, in large part due to the success of Stravinsky & his son, Alexander Tcherepnin and to modernist trends that became prevalent by the early Twentieth Century (Nikolay’s music remains rooted in the sound-worlds and mannerisms of Tchaikovsky, Massenet, and Faure). But the language of "Narcisse et Echo" (1911) and telling subtleties in its orchestral resources point to Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe" written a year later.