Once upon a time there was the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto, then there were two, then three and now, it seems, there are four concertos, together with other revelatory odds and ends. Koch’s lavish booklet-notes make heady claims not only for their endeavour but for a unique authenticity in performance. Alas, even a quick dip into the essays by Dr Polina Vaidman (archivist of the Tchaikovsky Archives in Lin), Lyudmila Korabelnikova (co-chair of the Tchaikovsky Society) and pianist, Andrei Hoteev shows propaganda masquerading as scholarship and a set of assumptions suggesting the reverse of musical knowledge or objectivity. Apparently ‘traditional stereotypes’ (by which is meant tired old chestnut performances by the likes of Horowitz, Gilels and Richter) have little to do with the composer’s true intentions. And it’s only when you listen to the ‘historical accomplishment’ represented by these recordings that you hear ‘a Tchaikovsky hitherto unknown’, one which ‘transports us to quite different spheres’. This is because for the first time in musical history the soloist realizes that the First Concerto, for example, is not the greatest of all battles for piano and orchestra but an organic unit similar to Brahms’s Second Concerto. Unlike other inverted alchemists who turn gold into tinsel, Hoteev, with his slow tempos and ‘mighty surges of sound’, returns Tchaikovsky’s scores to their first glory and gives us the musical equivalent of Dostoevsky’s ‘beauty will save the world’.
Unfortunately the promised revelation never materializes, as theory and practice divide in a flash. All these performances are of a uniform dullness and lethargy, making Tchaikovsky’s eternal glamour and appeal sink like a stone. Try the start of the First Concerto proper at 5'07'' and you will hear the reverse of Allegro con spirito. At 10'35'' the orchestra wobbles uncertainly as it tries to accommodate its soloist’s inertia. Even the Andantino’s central prestissimo (once described as ‘like a scherzo of fireflies’) goes at a snail’s pace. The same characteristics apply to Concertos Nos. 2 and 3 where both the massive cadenzas are endlessly protracted, their ideas portentously underlined and overpedalled.
But returning to the scholarly fray. Knowledge of the First Concerto is hardly changed or extended by a short interpolation in the finale, the ‘Fourth’ Concerto turns out to be the familiar Concert Fantasia, while the suggestion that we can at last hear the Second Concerto without Siloti’s cuts and the Third Concerto complete, eloquently shows how Russian scholars live apart. Peter Donohoe, Barry Douglas and, from Russia, Pletnev and Postnikova, eschew Siloti’s edition in the Second, while Peter Jablonski has more recently recorded all three movements of the Third Concerto. Again, neither the C minor Allegro of 1864 nor the Fantasy on Bohemian Melodies (a toying with gipsy themes based on a sketch by either Sophie Menter or – most improbably – Liszt and completed by Tchaikovsky) extend our knowledge of the composer beyond the margins. The recordings are undistinguished (was the pianist deliberately recessed in accordance with his view of being primus inter pares?) and although the performances are ‘quite unlike any others’ all Koch’s claims should be taken with a large dose of salt.'