Piano Concerto no 2 in G major, opus 44 -Tchaikovsky
“Beech Grove I“ (1902)
________
if a sonata, or any composition for one
instrument, is a meditation, a rumination,
an introspection, a concerto is its entire
opposite, it’s a declamation, a very
harangue, the performer is not only
before an audience, but before an
orchestra, before the conductor of that
orchestra, that soloist had better be,
therefore, something
Tchaikovsky’s 2nd Piano Concerto
hasn’t cut the cultural mustard, you’ve
probably never heard of it, never mind
heard it, not even in the miasma of our
collective unconscious
why
who knows, it’s magnificent
I suspect that Moscow’s distance,
St Petersburg’s, might’ve had something
to do with it, Russia would still have been
a backwater to Europe, regardless of what
Catherine the Great might’ve done for its
intellectual edification, indeed a veritable
Elizabeth the First, Queen of England,
she, in her sponsorship of the arts
something like that happened, but in
reverse, to Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele
in art, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, the
Second Viennese School in music, in
literature, Robert Musil, his “The Man
Without Qualities“ a very rival to
Proust‘s epic trip down memory lane,
“Remembrance …“, when the centre
of gravity for the arts moved from
Vienna to Paris in the late 19th
Century with the advent of
Impressionism
France had entered its Fourth
Republic by then, was to finally
entrench its democracy, and we got
Monet, Debussy, and indeed Proust
instead, not to mention all of that
city’s celebrated others
leaving creative Vienna, meanwhile,
the undisputed engine of the Zeitgeist,
the spirit of the times, for over three
quarters of an earlier century, thereby,
in the dust
New York would take over in the
1950s, similarly, for a time, Andy
Warhol and The Factory, eclipsing
any other town
in other words, location, location,
location, in tandem with historical
events
R ! chard
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