A Note on Tcherepnin's Fourth Symphony

Extract

Like his father before him, Alexander Tcherepnin is a prolific composer. He is also a fundamentally conservative composer who contrives to sound ‘modern’. With this modernity he has often flirted, but it is not the real man. When he is, as in this latest symphony, uninhibited, he is a very attractive composer. When he is carrying out what he conceives to be the stem duty of keeping up with the times, he can be a disappointment. He imagines modernity, or the contemporary idiom (as if there were only one!), to involve the kind of dissonance that would have made our forefathers wince. Although he is not particularly happy with it, he supplies it on occasions. But, stern duty done, he relaxes and is himself, and then we get works such as this symphony, which still uses his ‘modern’ idiom, but not to the degree that it disguises his true manner of speaking. His ‘modern’ style rests in the effect of persistent, local Neapolitan sixths playing against a basically tonal harmony and thus emphasising the more the basic tonality—what was, until a little while ago, mistakenly called ‘polytonality’.