As well as Tchaikovsky’s famous Piano Concerto, his extensive oeuvre for solo piano also makes an important contribution to romantic piano music. It includes “The Seasons” op. 37 – pleasant playable pieces that reflect a bygone bourgeois atmosphere and can therefore be assigned to the category of “domestic music”.

These twelve intimate mood-pictures enable the pianist to plot the course of the twelve months of the year. No. 11, “Troika”, displays a Russian character particularly well, when in...