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In his exemplary History of the Piano, Piero Rattalino provides an excellent summary of the main events concerning the piano in Russia from the early nineteenth century on, with the arrival in St Petersburg of John Field, who exercised a very strong influence through his teaching and then that of his pupils until the second half of the century, when the dominant piano figure became Anton Rubinstein. Around the 1860s, however, the world of music in Russia was shaken up by the arrival of a handful of young composers - who were to be known in the west as ”The Five” or ”The Mighty Handful” - and who sought to free Russian music from the dominant western compositional and formal models of the day and to return to the sources of the folk music of their homeland. As Rattalino writes, ”suddenly, in 1869, Russian piano music found its first masterpiece in the Oriental Fantasy Islamey by Balakirev [...], a successful piece and one which enjoyed great international success opening the gates to a flood of pieces with which the Russians soon rivalled the Germans and the French.”
This conspicuous current also includes Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s writing for the piano, which finds its most artistically significant and universally popular moments in the three piano concertos, and markedly in the first, in B flat minor, opus 23, composed in 1874. Though he was himself an excellent pianist, his interest was wholly directed towards composition. His piano production alone numbers some hundred pieces, including many small works of drawingroom or occasional character. This production ranges over Tchaikovsky’s entire music career, roughly from the first half of the 1860s to 1893, the year in which he wrote the 18 Pieces opus 72.
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