Amazon.co.uk Review
If musical families tended to be less in evidence in the 20th century than before, the Tcherepnin dynasty was a notable exception. Alexander (1899-1977) was the second generation, and achieved a good deal of success in his lifetime. As the First Symphony of 1927 shows, he had his finger securely on the pulse of the times, delighting his Paris audience with its driving, energetic music, and scandalising them with its percussion-only "Scherzo". A document of its time indeed, but the Second Symphony (1951) is much deeper and emotionally rounded. This is serious, intense music, speaking of wartime experiences relived and objectified, working to an affirmative but far from triumphal conclusion. The Fifth Piano Concerto (1963) opens with another questing, ambivalent movement, before moving into much more capricious territory, with Chinese traditional music adding some intriguing inflections. Noriko Ogawa sounds at ease with its outsize technical demands, while Lan Shui really gets to grips with this always interesting music. No, Alexander Tcherepnin didn't change the world, but he gave to his time something that's worth hearing today. --
Richard Whitehouse