What to do with Tchaikovsky 1st piano concerto's versions?

MusicBrainz Classical
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So it looks like the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto has some funkiness on MB. The original version has basically only a tiny handful of recordings, and almost all of the recordings are of the 1888 version. Yet the 1888 version doesn’t have individual movements broken out as separate works, and almost every recording on the MB service was tagged with the original 1874/1875 version. My thought was to take the existing separate movement works and change them to be the 1888 version separate movement works instead of making new ones for 1888 and then changing almost every recording on the whole service. What does the community think?

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That seems to be the easiest solution to fix it. After changes some other services (wikidata?) might have incorrect MBID for the version but I’m not sure how commonly these are used. I would still recommend making edits you proposed.

There’s discography provided by Tchaikovsky Research which can be used to identify the recordings of rarer versions.

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I’m a relatively new editor running into this (now that the first revision is helpfully flagged as rarely performed). I’m waiting for something I can use to tag these tracks, which are definitely the 1888 version.

I’d imagine your approach would be effective, particularly with an annotation explaining the history of the work ID. The other possibility that comes to mind would be to convert the existing 1874/1875 works to “catch-all for unknown revision”, with new works for the first revision and the movements of the 1888 – but I’m not sure the avoided inaccuracies there would outweigh the implicit work created. That Tchaikovsky Research discography lists two recordings of the first revision, four of the second, and over 60 pages of the third…

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I’ve also seen this mess recently and thought “this really needs dealing with” but wasn’t sure what to do, heh. I think moving the movement works over might make sense, but we should do our best to find stuff that is the old version and move them back; I expect they are likely to be marked as such in some way in most cases anyway.

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I checked the first-movement work’s recordings against the Tchaikovsky Research discography (November 2024 edition). That lists two recordings, one with the pianist Lazar Berman and conductor Yury Temirkanov, and the other with pianist Jerome Lowenthal. Neither of these are among the recordings currently associated with the works (there is another by Berman, but with another conductor).

Another thing to check is that the first version had the tempo marking “Andante non troppo e molto maestoso — Allegro con spirito” for the first movement rather than “Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso — Allegro con spirito” (again using that TR document as a resource), and the second movement was marked “Andante semplice — Allegro vivace assai” (in both the first and second revisions) rather than “Andantino semplice — Prestissimo”. Our current work titles for the movements don’t reflect this. There are actually quite a few recordings for the second movement that say “andante semplice”, but I’m not sure I believe them. As for the first movement, there are five recordings with “Andante non troppo…” in the name: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Of these:

1 and 3: Match an 1888/9 recording in the TR discography (including the CD catalog number)
2 and 4: Match an 1888/9 pianist/orchestra/conductor triplet in the TR discography, and are from the same label, but do not match on a specific catalog number (i.e., most likely an additional release from the label with the same recording)
5: Has no associated releases, apparently an orphaned copy of 4

To summarize, neither of these paths led to any strong evidence of a recording (currently attached to the work) that is actually of the 1874/1875 version.

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This does sound like a time to be bold and make the change :slight_smile: Feel free to link to the edits here.

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I added edits to modify the existing works; I used “make all edits votable” to hopefully make all the changes hit at the same time and avoid a period of confusion. Not sure if that was the right call or not.

If you can’t see all the edits at https://musicbrainz.org/user/d7b8w0f8/edits/open (now expired), here are the individual links:

Still need to make the new movements for the first revision.

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And the other links from that first batch:

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The edits have gone through and I made new works for the movements for the original 1874/75 revision:

The only external reference Google finds to the movement-level works that were moved is https://data.carnegiehall.org/works/32132/about. Wikidata only references the concerto as a whole.

All I can think of that remains is moving the recordings that are connected to the 1874/75 concerto as a whole.

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