Although André Tchaikowsky himself stated that he was born in 1935, he was apparently born on 1 November 1936. His father, Karol, was an Austrian educated in Germany who trained as a lawyer. Karol’s family settled in Paris and made their fortune from the fur industry. Tchaikowsky’s mother, Felicja, was Polish, and her family had a successful cosmetics business in Warsaw. Tchaikowsky’s parents married in Paris in 1932 and settled in Warsaw, but by the mid-1930s the marriage had failed and Karol returned to Paris. In 1938 Felicja married a Polish physician, but the next year Poland was invaded by the Nazis who killed most of Tchaikowsky’s family including his mother. However, the boy and his grandmother escaped the Nazi soldiers at Warsaw’s railway station and were hidden by a Catholic family in occupied Warsaw from 1942 to 1945.

After the war, Tchaikowsky studied at the State Music School in Łodź and his rapid progress led him to the Warsaw Conservatory where he studied with Emma Tekla Altberg, a pupil of Wanda Landowska. The twelve-year-old Tchaikowsky continued his piano studies, with financial help from the Polish government, at the Paris Conservatoire with Lazare Levy (1882–1964) gaining a premier prix for composition. At fifteen he returned to Warsaw and enrolled again at the Conservatory where he studied piano with Stanisław Spinalski, a pupil of Paderewski, and composition with Kazimierz Sikorski. In fact, at the age of twelve Tchaikowsky had applied to the Union of Polish Composers for membership.

Tchaikowsky won ninth place at the International Chopin Competition of 1955 in the year in which Adam Harasiewicz won first prize and Vladimir Ashkenazy second. He gave concerts in Polish cities, as well as in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The following year he won third prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels when Ashkenazy came first, Lazar Berman fifth and Tamas Vasary sixth. The year after that, Tchaikowsky emigrated to the West and whilst in Paris studied composition with Nadia Boulanger as well as receiving advice from Hans Keller and Thea Musgrave in England. Tchaikowsky also studied piano with Stefan Askenase.

His debut in Paris attracted the attention of Arthur Rubinstein, who invited the young man to stay at his apartment and organised a concert tour for him. Rubinstein was reported as saying, ‘I think Andre Tchaikowsky is one of the finest pianists of his generation; he is even better than that – he is a wonderful musician.’ Between 1957 and 1960 he gave almost five hundred concerts, making his American debut with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and Dimitri Mitropoulos in October 1957.

However, because such a heavy concert schedule allowed Tchaikowsky no time to compose, he subsequently restricted his concert schedule to only sixty appearances per year. For the remaining twenty-two years left to him Tchaikowsky divided his time between performance and composition. He wrote concertos for flute, violin, viola (unfinished) and piano, a symphony, three string quartets, a clarinet sonata, a piano sonata and inventions for piano. He also set seven of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and his one opera was based on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. During the late 1960s he settled in London, then in Oxford in the mid-1970s.

Tchaikowsky’s temperament was not of a type to compromise with conductors. Apparently, he had a stormy collaboration with Fritz Reiner, and when Karl Bohm gave him a recording of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor Op. 15 played by Wilhelm Backhaus, in order to show Tchaikowsky the tempi he would be using when conducting him, Tchaikowsky refused point-blank to co-operate. His repertoire extended from Bach to the twentieth century and he enjoyed particularly the works of Mozart. Tchaikowsky’s playing had an identifiable character about it and he seemed able to inhabit the world of the composer he was interpreting, giving a delineated style to each. He had a great love of the works of William Shakespeare, and bequeathed his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon for use in performances of Hamlet.

Tchaikowsky’s first recording was a debut recital disc made for RCA in 1957, on which he plays Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives Op. 22 and Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. The Ravel is a wild performance, but unfortunately there are many audible edits in Scarbo. The one recording he made with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C major K. 503. It is a particularly interesting performance full of rhythmic style, beauty and character. Tchaikowsky plays his own cadenza to the first movement, which in itself is of interest from his compositional point of view. He uses many modulations and keys that Mozart would have avoided, yet the result is satisfying. The playing is sculpted yet joyful, and these attributes appear on his LP of solo Mozart works for RCA. It would appear that none of Tchaikowsky’s RCA recordings have been issued on compact disc to date. His other main body of work in the recording studio was made for French EMI in the mid 1960s including Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations BWV 988, some Mozart sonatas and short pieces, music by Haydn, some dances by Schubert and fifteen of Chopin’s mazurkas. These recordings were licensed by Dante and issued in the mid-1990s on five compact discs where a live performance of Faure’s Piano Quartet in C minor Op. 15 is also included.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).