Death of a landmark Tchaikovsky pianist, 74
RIP
We would frequently receive emails from the pianist Andrei Hoteev about his efforts to clean up corrupt editions of the Tchaikovsky B minor piano concerto and restore the composer’s true intentions. He made himself the world authority on the work and played it with great bravura.
Hoteev’s recording of five Tchaikovsky works for piano and orchestra is a landmark of performance and research. Living in Germany since 1993 he was a close lookalike of Sviatoslav Richter. He was a regulara accompanist with Sergei Aleksashin, Robert Roll and Anja Silja.
We now hear that Andrei Hoteev has sadly died, weeks before turning 75.
Gosh, the B minor concerto . That’s a real rarety!
You haven’t heard this recording, because yes indeed it is rare. The version Tchaikovsky conducted and wanted published is not the over-familiar one. The 2nd concerto was known for decades in the corrupt Siloti version. The violin concerto was for 100 years played and recorded in Auer’s version with its multitude of small cuts. The Rococo Variations for Cello and Orchestra is almost always still played in Fitzenhagen’s version – he even re-arranged the order of some variations. The First Concerto was similarly edited – by Siloti. Hoteev wasn’t the only one to take up the correct version, and I wish anyone but Fedoseyev was the conductor.
I have not heard this more definitive edition of “The” Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto and will have to seek it out. Speaking as a non–pianist I can at least say that I do hear differences between the composer’s original and the Vilém Kurz re-write of the solo part to Dvořák’s Piano Concerto — and am vulgar enough to prefer the changes.
For some reason Tchaikovsky’s music has been fair game for changes. There are very different editions of Tchaikovsky’s Valse-Scherzo for violin out there, only one of which I assume is urtext, and performers have long felt free to make major cuts in the Piano Trio. The Manfred Symphony is often heard with cuts, and while most of us probably prefer hearing it with big concerto organ the fact is the score calls for harmonium. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2 is often heard with cuts as well.
Leopold Auer’s changes to the Violin Concerto, by the way, went beyond small cuts (cuts most noticeable in the third movement where indeed I do think Tchaikovsky in his practical ballet composer mode was padding things a bit with the repetitions as if he’d been asked to provide more time to get the corps off-stage or to allow a scenery change). Auer actually added difficulties, some modest, some hair-raising, to the solo part including the cadenza, and those to a concerto he had (according to the composer; Auer himself never, at least not in print, agreed that he had) declared to be “unplayable” at his first listening when Tchaikovsky first played it for him. In Auer’s defense, the composer had made a breach of etiquette by sending it to the publisher without allowing Auer the dedicatee the customary chance to provide the sort of input into the solo part that young Josef Kotek had provided. So Auer’s nose was out of joint. Plus Auer was not himself playing the violin at that first hearing, but was listening to the piano while reading the sheet music — and violin music written by pianists almost always tends to LOOK awkward on the page and playability cannot be evaluated until you have fiddle in hand. Example: Samuel Dushkin declared a chord Stravinsky showed to him on paper to be unplayable, then went home and tried it on fiddle only to learn it could be played. That chord opens the violin concerto and is heard again opening other movements, perhaps as a shared joke with his soloist about unplayable chords.
And Tchaikovsky’s Concerto IS difficult stuff; Hanslick’s famously unfair review of the premiere is full of bias but he makes plain that Adolph Brodsky, the soloist, had not fully mastered the difficulties and he, Hanslick, was not sure anybody could. But they could and did, Auer among them.
You’re gonna love it!!!
‘corrupt editions of the Tchaikovsky B minor piano concerto’
Everyone’s obviously been playing it in the wrong key for 150 years!
Yes, it should have been A Salt Miner.
During the Montréal “Mozart Plus” summer festival (1993) with the OSM (Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal) under Charles Dutoit Canadian pianist Louis Lortie played all Tchaikovsky’s piano and orchestra works, including Concerto No.3, op.75/79 and Fantaisie pour piano et orchestre, op.56.
I’ve always thunk that b fat miner was a bit tool oh for the Take-off-ski conch hurt ho; at last we can hear Tchaik’s original intetions: as a composer, don’t B major, don’t b flat, b-minor!
Sorry, what are you talking about?
In the 1980s Lazar Berman recorded the 1st Piano Concerto in what was labeled as the original version. Besides including some new extended material here and there the big news was that the opening chords were rolled, transforming the piano into accompaniment and changing the entire character of the introduction. Hoteev’s interpretation of the 3rd Concerto is curious in that he plays what’s published as “Allegro Brillante” at a quarter = 188, as an Andante moderato with something of a lyric character. His playing is wonderful, but his choice of tempo is unusual. Does this come from an original source too?
Thought I was seeing double. I wonder if he took the Tchaikovsky conveyors concertos back to their original form. Acting under Siloti’s advice, he cut down the whole first movement of the B flat minor and restructured it in the Lisztian/ Baroque style. The opening theme occurs once without repeating, then the rest of the piece is a series of final answers transforming themes. So many professional commentators ignore that he was master of counterpoint and fail to recognise his technique.
Something I can’t mention without being “diagnosed” by people, but I talked with Tchaikovsky about his first piano concerto. Through a spiritualist medium. And actually also about his death.
Because I had a dream regarding it I think, I noticed that there are structural elements where the turns the first theme upside down (that’s easy to see, it’s after the introduction, although that’s simply the dominant), backwards, and then upside down and backwards. He actually told me he had done what I noticed consciously. I noticed this kind of stuff in his symphonies also. I’m not actually going to answer questions about that here, though.
It was a wonderful conversation, and then another time I was talking with the medium on the phone, and had some sort of question about his death. I guess there was rumor that he had had something with a prince or so…… He told me that wasn’t true: “No I didn’t have some…..” but he explained that he [as a homosexual] had been discovered, and that someone (who he didn’t mention other than “someone”) made a sarcastic remark, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He said the last couple of years of his life had been that difficult. And he did commit suicide. But he didn’t make a drama about it, he actually turned things around. He asked me a very pointing question about the medium, because I had gotten a bit addicted to that sort of connection. Piotr simply asked me whether the medium wasn’t just like everyone, I replied with: “yes”… “no!”…… he in essence was trying to get me to see that that connection with God was always there in everyone. Then he said: “You’ll make it,” and then the spiritualist medium woke, up and remarked that he had tears on his face, which I now have too….
And during that time Tchaikovsky could have been put to death for being actively homosexual, and who knows what would have happened to his life, his music, etc…….
And God is there in everyone, even homosexuals and “crazy” people, and in music…..