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Piano Concerto No. 4, Op. 78, “Fantaisie” (1947) Movement I: Eastern Chamber Dream (Moderato) [beginning] Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977) was the son of Nikolai Tcherepnin (1873-1945), who was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov and a teacher of Prokofiev. Alexander Tcherepnin began his musical career as a precocious young pianist, and he soon began to compose avant-garde works and experiment with new tonal systems. His First Symphony caused a scandal at its 1926 Paris premiere, on account of its unusual second movement scored solely for untuned percussion. Since the pentatonic scale fascinated Tcherepnin, he decided to fuse the pentatonic music of the Far East with conventional Western tonal systems to create a new “Eurasian” music. In 1934, he traveled to China where he stayed for three years, studying Chinese music and establishing a conservatory in Shanghai. After he returned to Paris, Tcherepnin composed a number of works in his own distinctive and accessible “Chinese” style, of which the Fourth Piano Concerto is exemplary. The work is a series of three tone poems in succession: The Eastern Chamber Dream, Yan Kuei Fei’s Love Sacrifice, and Road to Yunnan. The soloist in this performance is Japanese pianist Noriko Ogawa, who joins the Singapore Symphony Orchestra with Chinese-American conductor Lan Shui.
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