Xiayin Wang – Tchaikovsky: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 3 – Scriabin: Piano Concerto, Op. 20 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:08 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Following her acclaimed recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in 2016 (Editor’s Choice, Gramophone), Xiayin Wang here completes the trio with No. 1 and the posthumously published No. 3, alongside Scriabin’s only concerto.
Whether Tchaikovsky gave his consent to the virtuoso Alexander Ziloti to revise his Piano Concerto No. 1 is unknown, but Wang here presents the lesser-recorded original version. Piano Concerto No. 3 was originally begun as a symphony, all of which except the first movement was ultimately abandoned; that surviving movement was later completed as a single-movement concert work for piano and orchestra.
Scriabin finished his piano concerto in only a few days, although it took months to orchestrate it before the 1897 premiere. Sensitively played by Wang, the concerto shows a naïve charm that even Scriabin, at his most translucent, would struggle to recapture once his career got underway
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Tchaikovsky & Khachaturian – Piano Concertos – Xiayin Wang, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Peter Oundjian (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96kHz | Time – 01:15:19 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: theCLASSICALshop | Digital Booklet | © Chandos Records
Recorded: Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow; 8 and 9 November 2015
After a year off the concert platform, Xiayin Wang, a specialist in the romantic repertoire, presents a new recording of two relatively little-played piano concertos: No. 2 by Tchaikovsky, in its much lesser-known yet extremely virtuosic original version, and Khachaturian’s. The disc also marks the 125th anniversary of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, here conducted by its Music Director, Peter Oundjian.
Involving the same forces as Wang’s earlier recording of American concertos (Editor’s Choice in the magazine Pianist), the album follows a performance in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, described by The Scotsman as ‘breathtakingly athletic’.
Composed more than fifty years apart, these pieces have perhaps only one thing in common, namely an opening grandiosity or grandeur. Yet, while Tchaikovsky in 1879, in his heyday, undercut imperial splendour with a wealth of contrasting material that pointed the way ahead to more experimental, post-imperial concertos such as Prokofiev’s Second, Khachaturian’s folk generalisations, vaguely Armenian or Georgian, remain the consistent thumbprint of a rather heavier style.
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