V.A. - Tchaikovsky: The Collection (5CD Box)

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V.A. - Tchaikovsky: The Collection (5CD Box)

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V.A. - Tchaikovsky: The Collection (5CD Box)

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Throughout his career Tchaikovsky’s instinct was for theatrical music, even in many concert works. Opera was his first ambition and he left us nine that were finished (including Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades), but alone among composers for the Russian Imperial Theatres a century ago, Tchaikovsky looked on ballet as deserving as much musical imagination as he brought to opera. He thereby set new standards in his three original scores for dance: Swan Lake (1877), Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892). All three were commissioned for the Imperial Theatres, with Swan Lake (for Moscow) having a story based on an image widely familiar in folklore, the captive Swan-Princess representing man’s quest for an unattainable ideal. Tchaikovsky had previously devised a modest domestic entertainment on the subject for his married sister and her family while spending the summer with them, but when he came to write the full ballet several people had a hand in shaping the story and he composed it virtually as a four-part tone-poem. The music is as carefully structured as any symphony, with a central key (B, major and minor) around which circulate mainly flat keys for the forces of evil and Icewitchment, sharp keys for the character dances and divertissements. Both are represented in the selection played here, but the richness of musical invention and initially poor choreography told against the ballet at first: it disappeared from the stage after a few seasons to become a success only after Tchaikovskys death. By the time he was lured back to ballet more than a decade later for The Sleeping Beauty Tchaikovsky was also happy to work closely with Marius Petipa, the great French-born ballet-master at St Petersburg, who mapped out a detailed sequence of dances with suggestions for length and musical character. Without following all the details, Tchaikovsky found this useful, and replaced the key-relationships of his previous ballet with a musical structure built from the contrast of dances for narrative, mood and character. Princess Aurora, whose music of the "Rose Adagio" is the first to be heard in this selection, is associated not with a theme but with the waltz rhythm that always drew Tchaikovsky's most fertile invention: the "Garland Waltz" included here, for instance. Aurora's “Wedding Pas de deux" with the Prince is a major highlight, as is an item of purely descriptive music in the "Panorama" that accompanies the Prince and the Lilac Fairy to Aurora’s bedside. The ballet was popular in Russia from the start; its wider success in the world began with Diaghilev’s lavish production for his Ballets Russes at Lonclon’s Alhambra Theatre in 1921.

The Nutcracker was composed as one half of a double-bill with Tchaikovsky’s one-act opera, Yolanta, but some months before the first night he took the unusual step of allowing a suite from the ballet to be performed at a St Petersburg concert. lt comprised the Overture and music here recorded, and almost every number was encored, heralding the universal popularity accorded the "Nutcracker Suite" ever since. For reasons more visual than musical, the full ballet was only a partial success at its first performance, before it became a perennial seasonal favourite during the present century. Tchaikovsky composed this music with the intention of being charming rather than dramatic. Among his own inventions he made use of folk themes from Germany, France and Georgia (the "Arab Dance" in this suite). His despair at the problem of picturing the Sugar-plum Fairy in music was solved, for himself and all his listeners then and since, when he heard in Paris the bell»like tones of the celeste, the keyboard instrument then newly invented by Auguste Mustel: Tchaikovsky had it sent to Russia in strict secrecy so that he would be the first to use it.

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V.A. - Tchaikovsky: The Collection (5CD Box)

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The inspiration for what became his Sixth Symphony came to him during a trip abroad in the winter of 1892-3, though he wrote to a friend that this time it was to be ‘a programme symphony, but with a programme which shall remain a mystery for everyone'. Shortly after its premiere, which took place in October 1893, he felt the need to give it a title and, after some reflection, lit upon a description which was suggested by his brother Modest’s observation that its prevailing character was ‘pathétique'. Used in this context the word has none of its present-day connotation of inadequacy, pitifulness, or distress: rather it reflects the meaning of the Greek root pathetikos and suggests that the symphony affects the emotional sensitivities of the audience, while also reflecting the composer’s changing moods and feelings at the time of its composition. Only a few days after the premiere Tchaikovsky was dead, having committed suicide, possibly through drinking contaminated waten perhaps through having taken poison: even today the circumstances of his death remain far from clear. Given the tragic events following its composition, the Sixth Symphony has inevitably come to be regarded as a musical expression of Tchaikovsky's world-weariness and increasingly fatalistic disposition. However, as in the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, there are many moments of relief from the prevailing sombre mood. Unbridled lyricism (represented by the second subject of the first movement), quixotic humour (the irregular 5/4 metre of the waltz), and bombastic false optimism (the faintly militaristic third movement) are all juxtaposed with expressions of the deepest sorrow, which reach their apotheosis in the final tragic Adagio. The emotional tapestry spanned by the work is enormous and in many ways adumbrates Mahler’s later approach to the symphony, while at the same time providing a moving final insight into Tchaikovsky’s own intellectual and spiritual world.

The fascination for postulating programmatic interpretations for Tchaikovsky's symphonies, as many have attempted to do, is perhaps inevitable given the composer's own involvement with more overtly descriptive orchestral writing. Of the many such works which he composed none is more representative, or better-known, than his attempt to encapsulate in music the spirit of Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet. Work was begun on an overture describing the entaglements of the Capulet and Montague lovers as early as 1869, following a suggestion by Balakirev. Tchaikovsky was himself much taken with the project, but its first performance was inauspicious. After an initial reworking of the score for publication in 1871, the composer made a more substantial revision in 1880, now calling the work a ‘fantasy-overture'. This is, indeed, an apt description, for although the conventional sonata-form overture provides the basic structural model, its adaption to the requirements of conveying the programme results in a freer form which is more fittingly reflected by the word ‘fantasy'. With its opulent orchestration and brilliantly-drawn characterizations of the two lovers, it is a worthy tribute to Tchaikovsky's skill as a composer of programme music.

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V.A. - Tchaikovsky: The Collection (5CD Box)

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V.A. - Tchaikovsky: The Collection (5CD Box)

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V.A. - Tchaikovsky: The Collection (5CD Box)

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