It was Michael Snow (as indicated in its title*) who suggested the simple premise of the piece. It started around 1995, with a surprise phone call from the newly appointed conductor, and artistic director, of my local’s main orchestra, the Toronto Symphony.
The conductor, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, invited me out to lunch, the first of several. We entertained ourselves with crazy ideas of how to present orchestra concerts differently.
I mentioned these discussions to Michael Snow, an improvising cohort, and excellent musician, as well as filmmaker. Mike suggested that an interesting juxtaposition might be to bring in the blazingly brilliant pianist Cecil Taylor for a piano concerto. Since Taylor’s own compositional strategies depend on a great deal of improvisational commitment from musicians, and this sort of commitment might seem foreign to many orchestral musicians, and there’d be little rehearsal time, the suggestion was to let the orchestra do what they do best, plays notes they know from the page, and to let Maestro Taylor be himself, with no constriction; this in the form of an existing, and ideally well-known concerto for the band to play, with the pianist free of any reference to the written soloist part, improvising both cadenzas and ensemble accompaniment.
Snow became chums with Cecil Taylor during his time in NYC in the ’60’s, and was cognizant of the Classical European aspect of Taylor’s education. Of Cecil Taylor’s playing, pianist Glenn Gould has remarked “This is perhaps the most formidable pianism these ears have heard: this is the Great Divide of American piano playing.'' (Of Glenn Gould, conductor George Szell exclaimed, “This nut is a genius.” Of George Szell, someone said...etc.).
I passed one of Taylor’s unusually brief recorded concert encore solos on to Jukka-Pekka— he was very impressed.
Eventually, nothing happened. No new work was ever generated by myself or Cecil Taylor for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. But several years later an opportunity arose. Paul Plimley, a unique Canadian pianist, working in the influential wake of Cecil Taylor, commissioned a piano concerto from me, to be performed with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra. This was the perfect opportunity to realize Michael Snow’s excellent idea. Paul was game to play, even though we weren’t seeing ear-to-ear as to what the ideal source concerto might be. He suggested a particular one by Brahms. Mike Snow as well had speculated that Cecil Taylor might have been particularly lured by the opportunity to play along to Brahms.
I can’t remember why i fixated on Tchaikovsky’s First, other than it would also be my first piano concerto, and the piece did sound awfully familiar, which i considered an asset for an audience in recognizing the deviancy of the soloist. This puts the piece firmly in the Rascali Klepitoire.I suggested to Paul that we needed to get together to work on the piece.
We live about 4000km apart.
The piano i’m most familiar with ‘playing’ and ‘composing’ on is the Yamaha Disklavier, which is an acoustic piano (coming in all sizes up to concert grand) which can replay robotically and accurately whatever has been played on its keys; or, alternatively, whatever piano playing instructions are sent to it, by a computer for instance. There was a Disklavier i could use at the Avatar Studio in Quebec City, about equidistant to Paul’s base and to where i’d be in Europe at the time. The added incentive for this globetrotting arrangement was that Quebec City was only a couple of hours drive from Victoriaville, a small town known for its hockey sticks and an international festival of Musiques Actuelles, where Cecil Taylor was scheduled to perform solo on a date convenient to our plan. My suggestion was that i would treat Paul and i to attending the concert.
So we rendezvoused in Quebec. I brought along a MIDI score of the orchestra parts, minus piano. This would play a version of the piece with sampled instruments which Paul could play along with, and the piano would record his every keyboard gesture; which in synch with my little mechanized orchestra, we could play back and listen to and discuss.
Except we didn’t get much work done. For one thing Paul really disliked the Tchaikovsky. I was of the notion that this was a good thing— that an adversarial performance would likely be more in keeping with the intent and possibility of the piece than would a sympathetic one.
The other thing was that Paul was getting sick, possibly a nasty flu bug. But i guess i can be persuasive, and we eventually agreed that Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto was our framework. Paul was sicker on the day of the concert. Nonetheless we rented a car, and drove to Victoriaville. We got to the one motel where all the musicians playing in the festival tended to stay. The phone in my room rang moments after i entered. Michel LeVasseur, the festival director had heard we were in town, and was on the line. ‘John, John, you have to help me. I don’t know where Cecil is. He has missed his plane. He said he had to visit his brother in court this morning. I didn’t know he has a brother. The concert is scheduled to be broadcast live nationally on the radio. We need someone to play. All the other musicians in town are already doing their own concerts. You and Paul are the only ones who are just visiting. Can the two of you open the concert for Marilyn Crispell?’ (Crispell, another very talented pianist influenced by Taylor, had been billed as the opener for him). I mentioned that i didn’t have my saxophone with me, and that Paul wasn’t feeling well, but, after conferring with Paul, i replied ‘sure, we’ll do it’.
Victoriaville is a couple of hours drive from the nearest international airport. At concert broadcast time, as we were about to go onstage, Michel LeVasseur told us that Cecil Taylor had just arrived in Montreal by plane. We still went on, me with an alto borrowed from Joanne Hetu (who said it was a different instrument when i gave it back to her— sorry Joanne) and Paul with a bucket which he kept close by, but thankfully didn’t need to use. After a set of solos and duets (released as the first disc in the triple-CD set Complicité) Cecil Taylor arrived, Marilyn Crispell played, Mr Taylor played, and we all hung out afterwards, but i’m sorry to report that i have no memory of whether the piano concerto which inspired Michael Snow to recommend Cecil was ever mentioned.
The premiere concert in Vancouver was a big challenge for Paul. In addition to my contribution, he was performing another concerto premiere, one which, unlike mine, required being somewhat familiar with a lot of notes. That, combined with his continuing dislike of the Tchaikovsky, may have been a factor in the degree of fumbling through that he exhibited at dress rehearsal with the orchestra a few hours preceding the performance. This was Paul’s first experience fronting a full orchestra which i can only imagine (having once been a featured soloist for a big band) can be a bit overwhelming. In any case in the couple of hours before the concert Paul hunkered down with the abridged score for the Tchaikovsky.
Meanwhile there was an additional element for this performance: the festival in Vancouver also featured bassist Barre Phillips in from Europe. Fifteen years previously, i had assembled in my studio a quartet of improvisors: Steve Lacy, Larry Dubin, Cecil Taylor and Barre Phillips for a plunderphonic track i produced entitled Mirror. These four musicians had been recorded about a decade earlier, but not together. What i did was to combine a solo improvised performance by each of them to create a conventional jazz instrumentation of saxophone, piano, bass, and drums. (This sort of independent coming together Frank Zappa coined as xenochrony.)Three of the solo performances took place on separate occasions in the same venue: the Music Gallery in Toronto; so they had an acoustic context in common. Cecil Taylor had played with two of the other musicians, Steve Lacy back in the ’50’s, and Barre Phillips in the ’70’s. Michael Snow had tried to arrange for Cecil Taylor and drummer Larry Dubin to play together before the latter died, but it never happened, in real life. Thus these were the connections i tried to make in Mirror, and this initiated the pleasure i had in including Barre Phillips in the first performance of Oswald’s First Piano Concerto by Tchaikovsky (as suggested by Michael Snow).
During the concert Barre was secretly welcomed to join the bass section for the show, including playing the orchestral parts of the concerto.
The piece begins with the famous first bars of Edvard Greig’s only concerto: timpani introducing the piano, which in Oswald’s First dovetails into the the first notes of Tchaikovsky’s First before altogether abandoning further notation for the soloist. The conductor (in this instance it is Michael Ferris) meanwhile is invited to take the liberties necessary in guiding the orchestra through the score in response to the soloists improvisation. The soloist’s playing can influence tempi, dynamics, entrances, and pauses for cadenzas (also of course improvised). In the Vancouver performance, somewhere in the middle of the music, from the bass section Barre Phillips began an upper register arco solo of his own, then walked the bass to the piano, and entered into a duo cadenza with the pianist.
Even the orchestra gets a tutti improvised moment near the coda.
— john oswald

*The convoluted title, Oswald’s First Piano Concerto by Tchaikovsky (as suggested by Michael Snow) alludes to the 1974 film Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen. The film, several hours long, was written and directed by Michael Snow (an anagram of Wilma Schoen).