Peter Jablonski certainly has the sound and technique to do justice
to the blockbuster demands of these concertos. In the "finale" of
Concerto 3, he brings off the main theme's unidiomatic chordal
writing with balanced, weighty tone; in the first-movement cadenza
of No 1, the sequences of triplet chords are impeccably placed
and balanced - a combination that eludes most pianists At the
other end of the scale, Jablonski dispatches the light, scampering
arpeggios and other rapid figurations with aplomb, though some
of them miss the firmness and weight of his loud playing.
Unfortunately, the soloist's temperament, at least here, is mismatched
to the blockbuster technique. Jablonski seems not to connect
with this music, for all his technical expertise and capacity
for putting out sound. Only here and there - and mostly not in
flashy moments - do these performances transcend the workaday.
Thus, the B-flat minor concerto is marked by a capable but strangely
dispassionate execution of the most challenging passages, and
a fitful rubato in the lyric pages. The phrasing is musical,
but doesn't mean much. There's a single flash of insight, at
the start of the
Andantino semplice's quick central section,
where Jablonski marks off the top of the first arpeggio with
a brief pause, providing a definition missing in the customary
show-offy scramble. Similarly, the G major concerto, which doesn't
avoid discursiveness here, only sporadically comes to life. At
2:13 in the first movement, when the clarinet introduces the
second theme, Jablonski intones the piano's extended lyrical
answer with a calm simplicity that's all the more appealing amidst
the score's rhetoric. And the full-bodied articulation of the
finale's quick passagework is impressive.
The three-movement work that Decca presents here as the "Third
Concerto" isn't, exactly. Tchaikovsky began a sixth symphony
in 1892; he ultimately abandoned it in favor of the
Pathétique,
but reworked material from it into a one-movement concerto, the
Op. 75. He began sketching a second and third movement for it,
completed after his death in 1893 by Taneyev and published as
the Op. 79
Andante and Finale. There is some logic to
performing the three movements together, since they're all derived
from the discarded symphony, but the composer obviously didn't
authorize the practice.
Jablonski's conductors are little help. Peter Maag seems unsympathetic
to the B-flat minor concerto, to the point of allowing some slapdash
playing in the coda, where the
tuttis sound vaguely unkempt.
In the first movement of the G major, Charles Dutoit here keeps
a musical and steady, but none too firm, hand on the tiller;
the
tuttis don't sound grounded, and there's little attempt
to elicit variety of color, though the conductor made his name
in Montréal as a colorist. He's better attuned to the
chamber-music quality of the uncut
Andante non troppo -
allowing the violin and cello melodies to blossom, fostering
a pleasing interplay with the piano - and he propels the finale
with springy dotted rhythms. Neither conductor nor pianist alleviates
the high bombast quotient in the E-flat's "outer movements",
and ensemble is poor in the first movement recap, with the strings
lagging behind the piano's triplets at 12:08. But the central
Andante,
again, is appealing, with warm string sonorities and a singing
quality; pulsing syncopations reinforce the forward motion in
the faster central section. It's not by accident that I'm describing
orchestral effects; the piano writing in this movement, largely
comprising filler arpeggios, is more or less irrelevant.
The Grieg is an unusual if substantial fill-up - I suspect it
was the B-flat minor concerto's original disc-mate, and at first
the performance seems cut from the same cloth, competent and
routine. The first-movement development abruptly comes to life:
the flute and horn solos, haunting and pensive, bring a sense
of involvement that remains through the rest of the movement.
The
Adagio is attractive, if not particularly individual,
but then the finale's spacious second theme again elicits expression
and nuance; a bit later, when the movement's main theme returns,
retro-fitted into 3/4 time, at 8:24, Jablonski gives it a nice
dancey lift and a light touch, though the momentum falters before
the
tutti.
The sound, a digitally homogenized rendering of Decca's old analog "house
sound", is plausible but frustrating: a level that brings
some presence to the woodwind solos and quiet strings leaves
the upper brass sounding aggressive and raucous.
Eloquence's proof-reading department needs attention. The front
of the booklet identifies the composer as "Tchaikovksy," while
both the rear insert and the booklet's track listing render his
first name as "Pytor"; the track-listing credits Christopher
Warren-Green and Andrew Shulman as soloists in the wrong slow
movement: that of the E-flat Concerto, rather than the G major.
Stephen Francis Vasta
Peter Jablonski (piano) 
