Piano Concerto No. 3 (Tchaikovsky) - "Symphony No. 7"

"Symphony No. 7"

For the LP sleeve-note of the HMV/Melodya recording of Tchaikovsky's so-called "7th Symphony", which used all the material from the Piano Concerto No. 3 but with the solo part allocated to orchestral instruments, and on which the USSR Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Leo Ginzburg, John Warrack wrote that the Russian musicologist and composer Semyon Bogatyrev "worked on the sketches contained in the composer's notebooks at the House-Museum at Klin, and out of these constructed a four-movement symphony on what seems to have been Tchaikovsky's original plan." Bogatyrev studied the notebooks, sketches, the piano concerto revisions, and Sergei Taneyev's reconstructions of the Andante and Finale, which form the second and third movements of the 3rd Piano Concerto in its complete form, and was able not only "to deduce a great deal of what Tchaikovsky seems originally to have intended for his symphony ... but was able to reconstruct a fair semblance of how he might have completed it."

It seems certain that Tchaikovsky had intended his new symphony to be in the usual four movements and Modest Tchaikovsky believed that in discarding the symphony in favour of a piano concerto, the composer turned the Scherzo into the tenth of his Eighteen Pieces for Piano, Op. 72. This view is bolstered by the same music existing in an orchestral sketch written at the same time, so in Bogatyrev's edition it duly took its place as the 7th Symphony's third movement. Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the work its Western Premiere on 16 February 1962 and made a recording shortly afterwards for CBS.