TCHEREPNIN : The Symphonies and Piano Concertos (Singapore Symphony Orchestra · Lan Shui · Noriko Ogawa) 4CD BOX -SET (2008) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Swedish label BIS has undertaken a number of extended surveys of certain composers in need of attention, such as Jean Sibelius, Kalevi Aho, Nikos Skalkottas, and Alfred Schnittke. One of its most exciting projects, a decade in the making, is a cycle of the major orchestral works of cosmopolitan Russian Alexander Tcherepnin with the Singapore Symphony under Lan Shui, featuring pianist Noriko Ogawa. The most celebrated member of a family of important, multinational musicians, Tcherepnin started out somewhere between late romanticism and neo-classicism, then played a key role in the establishment of concert music in the Far East in the 1930s, finally settling in the United States, where his industriousness was welcomed but not celebrated in a particularly extraordinary way. Tcherepnin's music was mostly already forgotten by the time he died in 1977. With the groundswell of interest in non-western concert music after the turn of the twentieth century, the time was right for Tcherepnin to make a comeback.

This four-disc box contains Tcherepnin's six piano concertos, dating from 1918 to 1965, and his four symphonies, dating from 1927 to 1959, plus the Festmusik, Op. 45a (1930), and several shorter orchestral works spanning the same basic time frame as the symphonies. Noriko Ogawa is not kept idle outside of the piano concertos, as the symphonies often contain significant piano parts; Tcherepnin was not a subscriber to the purist notion that the piano should remain absent in symphonic texture. Naturally it is the works of the 1940s and 1950s -- those written in the wake of Tcherepnin's experiences in the Orient -- that grab one's attention right off the bat, with their admixture of ingratiating Asian themes, colorful orchestration, and carefully modulated modernist elements. In this respect the Piano Concerto No. 4, subtitled "Fantaisie" (1947), is a standout, with Tcherepnin sounding almost like an Asian Gershwin; Ogawa particularly shines in this work. However, the earlier modernist pieces are equally fascinating with their clipped, French neo-classicism spiced with the language of Prokofiev, and this is an idiom he returns to in the latest work included, the Piano Concerto No. 6 (1965).

The one major work that kind of doesn't fit the mold is the earliest entry, the Piano Concerto No. 1 (1918-1919). In the mold of the classic Russian romantic piano concerto, its driving, motoric opening is almost reminiscent of Philip Glass and its modal harmonic preferences still set it apart from the better known piano concertos of Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov, whose one effort in the genre this resembles the most in a formal sense.

The performances with Lan Shui and Singapore are all quite dedicated and spontaneous and they crackle with the urgent excitement of discovery; however, they are also refined and are beautifully recorded by BIS. Tcherepnin's orchestral music is a veritable Pandora's Box of treasures that easily make the case that this key twentieth century composer was rather unnecessarily and wrongly swept under the rug, a baby thrown out with the bathwater. Anyone who is a fan of Noriko Ogawa or of Russian music or of pioneering efforts in East meets West type fusion -- any number of relevant things, really, in regard to truly great music of the twentieth century -- this is a set you will cherish. Uncle Dave Lewis
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