Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23

Program notes

About the Work

Few of the world’s best-loved concertos had so unpromising a birth. Tchaikovsky composed his First Piano Concerto over the winter of 1874–75, and on Christmas Eve 1874 he played it through for Nikolai Rubinstein, the most powerful pianist-administrator in Moscow and the man he hoped would premiere it. Rubinstein’s response, as Tchaikovsky later recalled in a wounded letter, was devastating: the concerto was ‘worthless and unplayable’, bad, vulgar, beyond rescue. Stung but defiant, Tchaikovsky declared he would not alter a single note, withdrew the dedication, and offered the work instead to the German pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who pronounced it ‘so original and noble.’

So it was that this most Russian of concertos received its first performance not in Moscow or St Petersburg but in Boston, on 25 October 1875, with Bülow as soloist: about as far from home as the music could travel. It was an immediate success, and its popularity only grew. Rubinstein himself, to his credit, later came round, took the concerto into his own repertoire and played it many times across Europe.

The irony of Rubinstein’s verdict is that the concerto’s supposed faults are exactly what audiences adore: its lavish melodies, its grand rhetorical gestures, its sheer generosity of feeling. Tchaikovsky wove folk material into it (a Ukrainian tune sung by blind street musicians shapes the first movement, and a Ukrainian spring song drives the finale), grounding the Romantic splendour in something earthier. The result is a piece of irresistible warmth and brilliance, and one of the cornerstones of the entire piano repertoire.

What to Listen For

The opening is one of the most famous passages in all music, and one of the strangest. Horns sound a summoning call, and the piano crashes in with massive rolling chords beneath a broad, soaring melody in the strings. It is music of overwhelming grandeur, yet Tchaikovsky plays a curious trick: this magnificent tune is in the ‘wrong’ key (D-flat major, not the home B-flat minor), it lasts only a few minutes and, astonishingly, it never returns. The movement proper begins afterwards, built from the nimble Ukrainian folk theme; listen for the long, glittering solo cadenza near its close.

The second movement (Andantino semplice) is a tender intermezzo: a solo flute sings a simple, dreamy melody that the piano takes up, before a sudden quicksilver middle section dashes past like a scherzo and the calm returns. The finale is a whirling rondo on a stamping Ukrainian folk tune, full of rhythmic drive. Keep listening for the moment, near the end, when the orchestra seizes a soaring lyrical theme and carries it to a blazing, triumphant conclusion, the concerto’s hard-won answer to its doubters.