The Music Treasury for 17 June 2018 — Andre Tchaikowsky, pianist/composer

by | Jun 16, 2018 | Streams and Podcasts

This week, The Music Treasury will feature Andre Tchaikowsky, both a composer and pianist from the 1900s.  His career, although short, was full with performances and a significant number of compositions, including an operatic setting to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

The show can be heard in the Bay Area on the KZSU radio station; it is available simultaneously on the ‘Net at kzsu.stanford.edu, from 19:00 to 21:00 PDT.  More information for the show is appended.

Andre Tchaikowsky (1935-1982), pianist and composer

Our on-air guest this evening will be commentator Mark Ainsley, who has graciously provided some of the recordings to be heard. He will discuss the career and recordings of Mr. Tchaikowsky.

Andre Tchaikowsky, the Polish-born British pianist and composer, died prematurely at the age of 46. He was born in Warsaw in 1935 with the name of Robert Andrzej Krauthammer. He showed musical talent from an early age, and his mother, an amateur pianist, began teaching him piano when he was four years old. When the Second World War broke out, he and his family, because they were Jewish, were moved into the Warsaw Ghetto. He remained here until 1942, when he was smuggled out and provided with forged identity papers that renamed him Andrzej Czajkowski; he then went into hiding with his grandmother, Celina. The pair remained hidden until 1944, when they were caught up in the Warsaw Uprising, and were sent to Pruszków transit camp as ordinary Polish citizens, from which they were released in 1945. Tchaikowsky’s father, Karl Krauthammer, also survived the war, and remarried, producing a daughter, Katherine Krauthammer-Vogt; Tchaikowsky’s mother, Felicja Krauthammer (née Rappaport), was rounded up in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, and perished in Treblinka.

Andrzej Czajkowski, as he then was named (he later adopted the spelling André Tchaikowsky), resumed his lessons at age 9 in Lodz State School, under the tuition of Emma Altberg (herself once a student of Wanda Landowska); from here, he proceeded to Paris, where Lazare Lévy took over his education, and where he would also break off relations with his father for many years after an argument.

After his return to Poland (1950), he studied at the State Music Academy in Sopot under Prof. Olga Iliwicka-Dąbrowska, and later at the State Music Academy in Warszawa under Prof. Stanisław Szpinalski. Already during his studies he began developing his concert career, displaying his showmanship through public performances of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and providing listeners with improvisations on any given theme. From 1951, he took composition classes with Prof. Kazimierz Sikorski.

After his success at the fifth International Chopin Piano Competition, where he won the 8th award (1955), he left to study in Brussels under Polish pianist Stefan Askenase. As a result of his co-operation with Askenase, Tchaikowsky took part in the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition, winning third prize (1956). In 1957, he gave a series of recitals in Paris, performing all of Ravel’s compositions for piano in honor of the 20th anniversary of the French composer’s death. During the same time, he consulted Nadia Boulanger at Fontainbleau in matters of composition, as well as establishing contact with Arthur Rubinstein.

Despite his success as a pianist, André Tchaikowsky’s greatest passion was composition. He wrote two Piano Concertos, a String Quartet, a setting of Shakespeare’s Seven Sonnets for voice with piano, a Piano Trio and several compositions for piano solo. He completed an opera, The Merchant of Venice, based on Shakespeare’s play. Most of the opera was written by 1978, and following discussions with the music critic Hans Keller, Tchaikowsky decided to submit it for consideration to English National Opera, then under the directorship of Lord Harewood. A play through of the first two acts was arranged in December 1981, with Harewood, the ENO artistic director David Pountney, and conductor Mark Elder in attendance. But in March 1982 Tchaikowsky received a letter from Harewood turning the opera down. By this time Tchaikowsky was already seriously ill, and he died only three months later. His dying wish was that the opera be performed. The opera was not produced until 2013 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria.

Mozart: Sonata Movement in C Minor, K. 312
Chopin: 3 Mazurkas, Op. 59
Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, Op. 110
Prokofiev: Sonata No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 28
Bach: Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Minor, BWV 1056 (w/F. Reiner)
Schubert: First Waltzes, Op. 9
Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 (w/U. Segal)
Chopin: Mazurka in C# Minor, Op. 50, No. 3

Related Reviews
Logo Pure Pleasure
Logo Crystal Records Sidebar 300 ms
Logo Jazz Detective Deep Digs Animated 01