Morning fuel, Russian music and Turkish artists
This morning, thanks to KDFC’s excellent musical judgment, I rocketed out of bed at 5:45am to the sound of the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s 1st piano concerto. For this purpose, I realized it’s quite superior to the third movement of Rachmaninoff’s Third (although nothing grips me like the first movement of that concerto).
The pianist was Fazil Say playing with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra under Yuri Temirkanov - new to me, but I think Say did an excellent job. Some pianists seem to get a bit dwarfed or drowned out by the orchestra, or feel bullied by the heady rush of the music and overcompensate by being too rigid and shrill. His chords were gratifyingly blocky, the bright runs up the keyboard like riding a wave, and he toed the line with the orchestra in volume and presence without dominating it.
(Looking into Say’s work just a little bit, it turns out he has quite an interest in jazz and contemporary music, and is a composer as well. I’m intrigued by his Black Earth album. You can preview some of it on his MySpace page, but not Amazon. Boo, Amazon.)
I have a hunch that Tchaikovsky wasn’t as prone to brooding, gruffness or melancholy as Rachmaninoff. But testing it would require reading the thick Tchaikovsky biography sitting on my shelf, and I’ve got springbok to analyze this month.
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