Murray McLachlan and the Chetham's Symphony Orchestra have already recorded the Second, Third and Sixth of Tcherepnin's piano concertos (Olympia, 11/94); here now are the other three, in their various ways cast in the same exuberant, heartfelt romantic manner. However, there is considerable variety within this general approach. The First, written in Paris in 1920, takes not the slightest interest in what was beginning to occupy French musicians and most other Parisian expatriates at the beginning of that exciting decade: it looks east, to a Georgia which Tcherepnin had known before exile, and north to an influence from, of all composers, Sibelius. The result is inventive but, predictably, less original than the later concertos. The Fourth, written in 1947, looks further east to China, a country which Tcherepnin had toured in the 1930s and where he met his future wife. It is more a set of three tone-poems, lightly accommodating Chinese musical gestures into the familiar romantic language, than a symphonic concerto. The Fifth belongs to 1963, and is a much more enigmatic work, and also by some way the most original of the entire set of six.
Murray McLachlan is a fine advocate of this music, which is technically demanding and, in the Fifth Concerto, also demanding of a subtle understanding if the most is to be made of its laconic gestures and rather greyer lyricism. The Chetham's Symphony Orchestra reaffirm their ability to cope with technically testing scores and, guided by Julian Clayton, to make musical sense of them with the command of more experienced musicians.'