On Tuesday’s (8/13) New York Review of Books blog, pianist Kirill Gerstein writes, “Recently, the British pianist Stephen Hough reported on his blog that he had made ‘The most exciting musical discovery of [his] life: Tchaikovsky’s wrong note finally corrected.’ The article questioned a note in Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto…. At the start of the concerto’s slow movement, the flute plays a phrase that consists of the notes A-flat, E-flat, F, A-flat.… Hough admits that the F has always bothered him.… [He] had … come across a manuscript of the work held in a library in Berlin. In that score, this potentially troublesome note is crossed out in blue pencil, and corrected, in script that seemed to resemble Tchaikovsky’s, to a B-flat.… In a subsequent post.… Hough wrote that it had come to light that none of the manuscript was in Tchaikovsky’s hand.… I contacted the Tchaikovsky expert Polina Vaydman, the senior researcher at the Tchaikovsky State Museum in Klin.… In Vaydman’s opinion, the idea that this F would be wrong is typical of a European view that repetitions of a theme should match.… But here Tchaikovsky … chooses to present two micro-variants of the melody, a bit like a forked path that later rejoins.… To me, the lovely, asymmetrical F is redolent of the unpaved country roads of Tchaikovsky’s Russia.”
Posted August 14, 2013
