Tcherepnin Family

Through his son Alexander (1899-1977) and grandsons Serge and Ivan the dynasty Nikolay Tcherepnin (1873-1945) founded – fin de siècle Tsarist, emigré Russian, Russo-American – spearheaded modern cross-cultural exchange. Serge (born 1941), America’s ‘legendary electronic mastermind’ whose teachers in Europe included Boulez and Stockhausen, went on to pioneer the Serge Modular Music System in the early seventies. Ivan (1943–1998) was director of Harvard University’s Electronic Music Studio. His sons Stefan (born 1977) and Sergei (born 1981) continue the line. Stefan is a mixed media creative focussing on immersive, meta-narrative installations. Sergei operates at the intersections of sound, sculpture and theatre.

In his memoirs Under the Canopy of My Life¹ Nikolay wrote that his forebears were ‘from the vicinity of Izborsk, an ancient Russian town in the Pskov province [close to the border with Estonia] … Our lineage is not of the old aristocracy … the first mention of the family appears only in the early 19th century’. His ‘lively, very gifted’ disciplinarian father was a physician whose social circle, belonging ‘mostly to the capital’s “intelligentsia”’, embraced Dostoevsky and Mussorgsky (attending the former during his final hours). Nikolay graduated in law in 1895, then in composition three years later, studying with Rimsky-Korsakov. From 1902 he conducted Belyayev’s Russian Symphony Concerts. In November 1907 he premiered his one- act ballet Le Pavillon d’Armide dedicated to Liadov – Pavlova, Nijinsky and Karsavina in the cast – directing it again during the inaugural 1909 Paris season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Having previously essayed his own orchestrally masterful response to the same conte de fée in the ‘symphonic sketch’ Le Royaume enchanté (1904), he declined Diaghilev’s invitation to write the Firebird (endorsing Stravinsky for preference), but helped with the piano rehearsals of Petrushka (1911). A completion of Mussorgsky’s Sorochintsï Fair was staged in Monte Carlo in 1923.

Between 1905 and 1918, during Glazunov’s tenure as director, he taught at the St Petersburg Conservatory, ‘Of all my teachers,’ Prokofiev enthused, ‘Tcherepnin was the liveliest and most interesting … Although I didn’t learn all I should have about orchestration in Rimsky-Korsakov’s class, I made up for it in Tcherepnin’s class. His talks about conducting [he was the first to teach the discipline in Russia] were always meaningful; his talk about the future of music was no less interesting: he struck me as such an innovator that it made my head swim.’ In 1918 he briefly became Director of the National Conservatory in Tbilisi. But with the Red Army occupying Georgia in February 1921, he left for Europe that August, via – like Nabokov, Bortkiewicz, Nicolas Slonimsky, countless others – the Black Sea route to Constantinople. Settling in Paris, he worked with Pavlova as composer and conductor; helped Rachmaninov establish the new Russian Conservatory (director 1925–29, 1938–45); and undertook concert tours around Europe and the United States, including a spell in 1932 as guest conductor of Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony Orchestra. From 1937 until his death he was president of the Belyayev publishing house in Leipzig, witnessing in absentia its wartime destruction in consequence of the RAF’s 1943 bombing of the city: ‘God only knows how much time, talent and work will be required to compensate for the truly immense damage that was inflicted on the world’s musical culture as a result of that brutal, senseless, ruthless attack during those calamitous December days.’ Surviving Nazi-occupied Paris, cessation of hostilities, and the US handover of Leipzig to the Soviets, Nikolay died within weeks of the war ending in Europe.

‘Music was religion.’ Religion per se was Greek Orthodox/Roman Catholic². Growing up in a heady environment, mentored by the writer and critic Alexander Ossovsky (linked with Belyayev), Tcherepnin fils studied with Nikolay Sokolov at the St Petersburg Conservatory (a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov) and, privately, the pianist Leokadiya Kashperova (who’d had lessons from Anton Rubinstein). Abandoning famine, cold, cholera and Revolution Russia in 1917, then Georgia in 1921 (surviving Spanish flu), he settled with his family in Paris, completing his studies with Paul Vidal, an early associate of Debussy, and Isidor Philipp, head of piano at the Conservatoire, in addition, as he put it, to ‘mingling with such people as Ravel, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Honegger, Milhaud and Martinů. He made his UK debut in 1922, Pavlova the following year presenting his first ballet, Ajanta’s Frescoes, at Covent Garden, ‘integrating Eastern and Western musical conceptions’ and inspired by pre-Christian Buddhist cave paintings. Some dismissed Pavlova’s initiative as amateurish and tedious. But the Daily Mail thought it was ‘worked out with brilliance, with a colour of its own’, while the Times admired the plentiful ‘rhythmic character’ of the music. Up to the war, Alexander spent time in America, Palestine, Egypt, China and Japan, in Shanghai meeting his second wife, the pianist Lee Hsien-Ming (1911–1991, trained by an old friend of his father’s, Boris Zakharov). Following the wartime Parisian years (writing ‘lots of [utility] trash for dancers, for music halls, etc. – which had to be signed by another name because I was Russian’), he moved to America in 1949 (‘the great change in my life’), settling in Chicago and teaching at De Paul University. Among the rewards of the fifties were world premieres with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Rafael Kubelík (Second Symphony, in memoriam Nikolay) and Fritz Reiner (Divertimento), and with the Boston Symphony and Charles Munch (Fourth Symphony). Acquiring US citizenship in 1958 and moving to New York in 1964, touring, playing and conducting his music widely – including a fêted return to the Soviet Union in 1967 (Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter exalting his presence), and a 75th birthday London concert in 1974 partnering Paul and Yan Pascal Tortelier – he died from a heart attack in Paris.

Before the war BBC London broadcast a half-hour recital by Alexander programming his own and some new Chinese works. ‘Considering … that Alexander’s music shows a good deal of paternal influence, it is hardly surprising that the son’s compositions are occasionally attributed to the father and vice versa. But Alexander has often betrayed a leaning toward bold harmonic experiment, not shared by Nicholas’ (3 December 1937³). An elevated, luminously impressionistic orchestrator, drawn to theatre (notably a dozen ballets, nine of them unpublished, and two late operas), descriptive music, smaller self-contained forms, and song, Nikolay grew out of the (imported) Minkus, (indigenous) Borodin/Liadov, Tchaikovsky/Rimsky-Korsakov tradition. ‘A journey fraught with surprise: sometimes disappointing, sometimes highly gratifying – never quite predictable’ (Benjamin Folkman).

‘Music is a uniting of people; that is its ultimate goal.’ A tonal synthesist, Alexander traced his evolution in a 1962 manifesto, Basic Elements of My Musical Language⁴, mooted originally in a 1950 letter to Slonimsky. First – alongside polyphony and counterpoint in ‘primitive’ and ‘developmental’ phases – there was the ‘nine-step scale’, an ‘equality of flats and sharps’ proposed in 1918 but only ‘consciously theorised’ in 1922. This ‘Tcherepnin scale’ (so-called, thirty-six forms of which are permutable) ‘results from [combining] two major-minor hexachords based on three interlocking major-minor tetrachords’. ‘Major-minor tetrachords are constructed within the interval of a major-third using two half-steps [semitones] and one whole- step [tone] … Major-minor hexachords are constructed within the interval of a major seventh using alternations of half-step and one-and-a-half-step intervals’. ‘Since my early youth I had the tendency and urge to combine major and minor chords. Only a [vertical] major-minor “tetra/chord” [sic] gave me the sensation of finality and stability. Gradually I extended the 1½-tone-½-tone-1½-tone row to reach the octave. By [combining] the ascending [Mode I] hexachord with [its descending Mode II inversion] I found the nine-step scale’ – C, D flat, E flat, E, F, G, A flat, A, B, [C]. ‘Firm’ or ‘soft’ intervals varied the harmonic tension. Next came ‘pure rhythm liberated from any pitch’; and, in 1924, ‘the sounds of nature [bird calls, insects] the rhythm of the spoken word’. ‘“Eurasian” ideology [escaping “the technicalities of my musical thinking”] gained supremacy by the late twenties⁵, based on the idea that the Russian “Empire” inherited the empire founded by the Mongols, [with the result] that Mongols became assimilated with Russians (or vice versa)’. Turning to folklore in the early thirties, having as a student been seduced by the Caucasian inheritance and orality of Georgia and Armenia as well Azerbaijan and western Persia, he found simplification and renewal. ‘Healing by folklore’ he called it (1933–41). ‘I felt that, what the anatomy of the human body is for a painter, folklore is for a composer. The [former] gives the lines of “life survival” … [The latter] gives us the lines of “musical survival”.’ Come the mid to late 1930s (‘fascinated by the instrumental, theatrical and vocal heritage of the Orient’), Chinese and Japanese major-minor pentatonic practice was a key stimulus; additionally Georgian ethnicity and quartal harmony. ‘The new musical language I now [c. 1960] use to express myself ... [synthesizes] all the technical devices of the past … [Structure] not musical language [outdated sooner or later] makes a composition long living.’ ‘The ultimate value of a composition is the complete balance of the “what” with the “how”. The “how” can and should be analysed. The “what” is extemporaneous and can only be felt, and escapes every cerebral investigation.⁶

Violin Sonata in C minor Op posth

There are no definitive details concerning Alexander’s C minor Violin Sonata (MS, Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel), revised for this recording by the Czech composer-pianist Giorgio Koukl. But it probably dates from around the time the Tcherepnins were living in Tbilisi (Autumn 1918–June 1921) when Alexander, who’d only brought with him some piano pieces from St Petersburg, was at the National Conservatory – immersed in Beethoven and Georgian popular and liturgical music. Its strength, tautness, rhythmic drive and climactic progression, the lyric beauty and tensile cut of its ideas – from opening minore Russianness to closing maggiore bravura, from the high tessitura piano writing and violin harmonics of the pawky second movement to the rumination of the Adagio third (functionally both intermezzo-like) – stamp it as a concert piece of ‘Grand Mogul’ flourish removed from juvenilia (its young author already had more than a dozen piano sonata trials behind him, not to mention symphonies and concertos). Not as intricately argued or ‘placed’ as the Op. 14 Violin Sonata (also written in Tbilisi) but impressive.

Arabesque Op 11 No 5 ~ Piano Trio in D major Op 34

The energy and Mendelssohnian facility of Alexander’s self-described ‘engrossment in pianism/harmonic and scale-like searchings’ period (1918–20) underlines the fifth Arabesque of the Op. 11 set, the only duo of a cycle otherwise for keyboard (1920–21). Brevity, linearity, neo-Classical clarity, incisive metric organisation hallmark the Piano Trio in D major, Op. 34 (1925, dedicated to Albert Blondel, Parisian director of Érard) – ‘a refined opus with insinuating warmth and a folkloric finale in big boots’ (Jonathan Woolf). All three movements cadence in Tcherepninesque major- minor waters. Intimations of Shostakovich surface. Anchors weighed, bar-lines are inflexible, time-signatures less so, albeit in no hurry to change. Pulse is everything.

Triple Concerto Op 47

No work of Alexander’s was revised more times than the Triple Concerto, Op. 47. ‘Yet,’ points out Folkman, ‘the many alterations … six different versions of the piece … were equivalent to little more than changes of clothes: the musical substance remained unchanged despite the many re-modellings in instrumentation.’ In its initial pesudo-Baroque ripieno-concertante form (1930) it took the guise of a Concertino for four violins, two violas, two gambas, two cellos, double bass and piano. In 1960, five re-castings downstream, the score was revisited. ‘During the autumn I made a new version for piano, violin and cello, [cuing the orchestral parts into those] of the soloists … and called it Trio Concertante. Such [a short-score] version could be used by the soloist[s] to study the Concertino among them, and also as a regular Piano Trio.’ The last draft (1965) was for trio and chamber orchestra. Fusing ‘Eurasian’ aspects, vertical/horizontal major-minor acidities and nine-step elements, the four movements, opening and closing in D, traverse landscapes of energy and stasis, rhythmic attack and lyric melody, massed sonority and individualised nuance. I (Alexander’s words): ‘March-like in atmosphere’; II: rhapsodic ‘concertante solos’ (violin, cello, piano); III: ‘a type of scherzo’; IV: rondo, ‘the rhythm (but not the actual notes) of a Georgian “dialogue” folk-song [alternating] with another in faster values, [ending] with a “fishtail” as the initial phrase of the first movement is evoked’ – a nostalgic five-bar echo.

Cadence fantastique Op 42bis 

Inscribed to Alexander Mogilevsky, a close friend of Scriabin’s (and the future teacher of Shinichi Suzuki), Nikolay Tcherepnin’s Cadence fantastique, Op. 42bis (1915, rev. 1926) is longer and weightier than its title might suppose. Active yet paced, harmonically entranced, it’s suggestive of a Symbolist tone poem drifting phantasmagorially between dream and delirium, implicative rather than programmatic. ‘An unpredictable journey where the denial of feelings, anguish, exultation and rage can burst out at any moment … a scene from a crazy opera where the protagonist is not the usual heroine sung by a coloratura soprano but, rather, an ecstatic, hyper expressive violin in a state of agitated frenzy …’ (François Pineau-Benois).

Pièce calme ~ Un air ancien

In 1935 Nikolay published two short woodwind pieces in collaboration with Debussy’s original faune, the New York based French flautist Georges Barrère (1876–1944). Pièce calme (Pastorale), C major. Dedicated to Fernand Gillet, principal oboe of the Boston Symphony. Un air ancien (An Old Russian Melody), A minor Recitative, C major Aria. Dedicated to Georges Laurent, Boston’s principal flute.

Villegiature Op 38 No 4

Villegiature (Dacha), Op. 38, No. 4, D major Allegretto giocoso, is an arrangement of the fourth number from Nikolay’s 14 Esquisses pour un alphabet Russe d’Alexander Benois (published 1910). Lazy days, salon twilights. For anyone unfamiliar with the hedonistic dacha culture of summering Russians, the score is headed ‘Cheerful white cottage in a garden [with ornamental pond]. Children play on the lawn.’ The artist and designer Alexander Benois, seminally associated with the Mariinsky Theatre, Ballets Russes and Hermitage Musem, was Nikolay’s brother-in-law. His Azbuka v kartinakh, scenes from Russian folklore, fairy tales, daily life and the Bible illustrating each letter, was printed in St Petersburg in October 1904.

© 2024

¹ Bowdlerized edition Leningrad 1976; unexpurgated manuscript Issy-les-Moulineaux/Seine c 1942–44, translated John Ranck (Tcherepnin Society, www.tcherepnin.com).

² ‘A Short Autobiography’, Tempo, issue 130, September 1979.

³ Radio Times, issue 739.

⁴ Benjamin Folkman, Alexander Tcherepnin: a Compendium (1995), New York 2008.

⁵ George Vernadsky, A History of Russia, New Haven, London 1929.

⁶ ‘A Short Autobiography’ op cit.