Tchaikovsky Piano Concertos by Stephen Hough

Stephen Hough has never been content to play the warhorse and walk away. That matters here, because this two-disc Hyperion set isn’t simply a collection of Tchaikovsky’s piano-and-orchestra pieces — it’s an argument, a sustained case that the composer’s relationship with the concerto form was richer, stranger, and more conflicted than the thundering opening chords of the First have led most listeners to assume.

Start with what everybody knows. The Piano Concerto No. 1 in b-flat minor arrives in 1875, when Tchaikovsky is 35 and still smarting from the famous rejection by Nikolai Rubinstein — who called the concerto unplayable, vulgar, and beyond rescue. Hans von Bülow premiered it in Boston, of all places, to rapturous response, and Rubinstein eventually came around. The piece became the most performed piano concerto in the world. It also became, for that reason, a trap — a test of nerve and biceps that reduces great pianists to circus performers and invites the audience to listen for wrong notes rather than right ideas. Hough refuses the trap. His account is muscular without being brutal, the big octave passages in the first movement shaped with a clarity that lets you hear the harmonic logic underneath rather than just the noise on top. He leans into the lyric episodes — the Ukrainian folk tune in the first movement, the waltz-inflected second — with something approaching tenderness, which is not the word one usually reaches for in discussions of this concerto. Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra are with him all the way, the brass never overwhelming the piano’s middle register, the strings in the slow movement silky and attentive.

But the real reason to own this set is the Second Concerto in G major.

Tchaikovsky wrote it in 1880, five years after the First, and it has spent most of its life in the First’s enormous shadow. Unfairly. The slow movement — an extended triple concerto for piano, violin, and cello, the three instruments winding around each other in long, arching lines — is one of the most ravishing things Tchaikovsky ever wrote. I have heard conductors simply cut it, or hand it to the Siloti edition that trims the solo writing and essentially turns the thing back into a conventional piano concerto slow movement. Both decisions amount to vandalism. Hough plays the full text, with Jorja Fleezanis and Anthony Ross as his partners, and the results are extraordinary — the three lines genuinely conversing, no one instrument colonizing the others, the temperature rising and falling with the kind of natural inevitability that only the best chamber playing achieves. Fleezaness brings a slightly cool, focused tone that keeps the movement from tipping into the perfumed excess it can sometimes project; Ross is burnished and deep. The finale, which critics have called too long, too repetitive, reveals in this performance a genuine wit — Tchaikovsky’s rhythmic displacements landing with something like a wink.

Hough also includes both the Siloti edition of that slow movement and his own edition, a scholarly generosity that allows direct comparison. The differences are instructive and, if you care about such things, quietly devastating for the Siloti version.

Then there is the Concert Fantasia in G major, from 1884, which almost no one programs — a sprawling, inventive, genuinely eccentric work with a first movement that builds to a symphonic cadenza of almost preposterous ambition. Hough plays it as if he believes in every note, which may be the most important thing a pianist can do for a piece that still has to earn its audience’s trust.

The Piano Concerto No. 3 in e-flat major is the ghost in this collection — a single movement, all that Tchaikovsky completed before he died in 1893, the sketches for further movements later orchestrated by Taneyev. It is unfinished business in the most literal sense, a piece that keeps promising more than it delivers and then stopping, mid-argument. Hough plays it with the focus and commitment it deserves, though one cannot entirely suppress the feeling of a door left open.

The competing version most worth mentioning is the 1986 EMI release with Peter Donohoe, Nigel Kennedy, and Steven Isserlis — a distinguished interpretation with a different balance of virtues, Kennedy and Isserlis bringing a slightly more assertive character to the slow movement. I would not give up that recording. But Hough’s is more thoroughly satisfying, more intelligent in its architecture, and more consistently honest about what these scores actually say.

Hyperion’s fiftieth release in their Romantic Piano Concerto series is, improbably, one of its best.