Tchaikovsky. Deep Emotion Of A Russian Soul – Part Two

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. My name is Peter Cudlipp. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. I’m going to skip most of the preamble today as this is really a continuation of an episode so you’ve probably heard it already… and I’ll get straight into Part Two of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky on the Classical For Everyone podcast.

A few weeks back I did an episode devoted to Ballet and I featured a section from each of Tchaikovsky’s three ballets… Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty. I made the point then and I’ll make it again today. It is frankly inconceivable that three ballets written by one man almost 150 years ago would still be performed all over the world every year… but that is the case for Tchaikovsky. Now Ballet is not an area I can claim much familiarity with so I asked my AI friend Claude for some suggestions as to why these ballets remain so popular.

            And here is a summary…

• Tchaikovsky’s instantly memorable melodies;
• His brilliantly dramatic scores where the music tells the story even without the dancing;
• Tchaikovsky's gift for expressing deep emotion through music which works perfectly in ballet, where the stories often deal with love, loss, magic, and transformation. The music doesn't just accompany the emotions - it is the emotions.
• The scores command both grand spectacle and intimate character moments… creating great opportunities for choreographers and dancers;
• And maybe most importantly… danceability: The rhythms and phrasing seem to naturally inspire movement.

For this episode I thought I’d focus on just one ballet. This is the orchestral suite from ‘The Sleeping Beauty’. Tchaikovsky suggested that his ballet be adapted for the concert stage shortly after the premiere but it would not actually come into existence until some years after his death. It fell to his onetime student and later colleague Alexander Ziloti to do what I guess can be called the editing. It was published in 1899 and first performed in 1901… eight years after Tchaikovsky’s death. It is about nineteen minutes long. Mstislav Rostropovich conducts the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

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That was the Orchestral Suite from The Sleeping Beauty. Mstislav Rostropovich conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. One small surprise about Tchaikovsky is the relatively small amount of music for solo piano he wrote. For a composer whose Piano Concerto is considered one of the very greatest of the form it is a little odd that there is not a big body of work for the keyboard. I suspect that part of it is that unlike, for example his contemporaries Greig and Brahms, Tchaikovsky did not have a career as a keyboard performer. So in a way, the orchestra became his instrument whereas the for the others the piano was entirely central. But that did not mean that Tchaikovsky did not write any solo piano music. Here is the section of his collection ‘The Seasons’ called ‘October, Song of Autumn’. It is about 5 minutes long and is played here by Mikhail Pletnev.

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That was ‘October, Song of Autumn’ from the collection for solo piano called ‘The Seasons’. It was played by Mikhail Pletnev.

Ok. If you’ve listened to the previous episode you could be forgiven about now for thinking ‘ok, I guess that pretty much sums up Tchaikovsky’s massive and impressive output. Time to wrap things up.’ But that would mean missing out on a few more masterpieces… and there really is no other word… like his only concerto for violin and orchestra from 1878. This is another piece that, like so much else I’ve played in these episodes, is still performed all over the world. If you search ‘most popular violin concertos of all time’ the Tchaikovsky comes up either 1, 2 or 3 in the vast majority of cases.

And that prompts a point I want to make about Tchaikovsky’s reputation. It’s not an easy thesis to prove but I think that Tchaikovsky is considered by the tastemakers and programmers of the classical music world… a ‘lesser’ composer than say Beethoven, Bach and Mozart. I really wonder if the unrestrained emotional content of so much of Tchaikovsky’s work is at odds with the slight detachment of the gatekeepers of ‘serious’ music. And to that I’d add a historical bias toward music from German culture and pair that with an anti-Slav bias. Not that this really matters that much. And perhaps all I am really saying is that putting this show together has reframed my attitude to Tchaikovsky. And for that I am very grateful. Especially to…well, she knows who she is.

Alright. I was about to play you a section from the Violin Concerto and that is what I will do right now. Here is the violinist Viktoria Mullova, the conductor Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This is the third and final section of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. It is about ten minutes long and Tchaikovsky named the section ‘Allegro Vivacissimo’ which translates from Italian as ‘Fast and Really Lively’. I think this performance lives up to that instruction.

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That was…  the violinist Viktoria Mullova, the conductor Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra with the third and final section of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. A few minutes ago I said there were  couple of special bits of music yet to play in these all Tchaikovsky episodes. So what is the genre I have so far neglected. Oh that’s right. Symphonies. He wrote six of them and the final three remain really popular.

I am going to play you just the opening section of his last symphony…the 6^th. Now this work is loaded with a certain amount of historical and cultural baggage. Tchaikovsky gave it the subtitle of, in Russian… Pateticheskaya  meaning something like ‘emotional’ or ‘passionate’. Now rather unfortunately this was translated into the French ‘pathetique’ which has stuck and this term then unintentionally borrows from the English word ‘pathetic’ which it really has nothing to do with. And then there is the sad accident of timing that Tchaikovsky died nine days after he conducted the premiere in October 1893. So the work became somewhat freighted with the idea of death. Granted there is a darkness and a drama to the symphony and it is perhaps easy to project onto this the idea of it being some sort of final statement. But based on his correspondence during the composition of the symphony, Tchaikovsky was excited and optimistic… genuinely thrilled with what he was creating.

That is probably enough talk. Here is the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra conducted by Evgeny Mravinsky with the opening section of Tchaikovsky’s 6^th Symphony. It is about 18 minutes long. And as an aside this is one of the great examples of the crafts of not just performing music but recording music. If you can, you might want to turn it up.

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That was the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra conducted by Evgeny Mravinsky with the final section of Tchaikovsky’s 6^th Symphony.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. I have another couple of pieces coming up but before I get to them I want to give you a little information that I hope you find useful… If you would like to listen to past episodes, of which there are more than thirty, or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net

And on the individual episode pages of the website there are links to Spotify playlists with the full versions of most of the music played in each of the episodes.

I hope you have enjoyed these Tchaikovsky focused episodes of ‘Classical For Everyone’. If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. That would also mean the search algorithms will smile more benignly on the show and it might reach a few more people. For that I would be very grateful. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net.

Alright,  to finish this all-Tchaikovsky two episode special… I have something a little lighter. This is the end of his string sextet from 1890. He called it ‘Memory of Florence’ as he had started sketching it there and there is maybe something of the Italian sunlight in the music.

Interestingly the work is more frequently performed by string orchestras these days and that is the case here with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. The final six minutes of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Memory of Florence’

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That was the final six minutes of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Memory of Florence’ performed by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’. This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never.

And if you have listened to the credits… here is a little bonus for you… Here is ‘January, By the Fire’ from Tchaikovsky’s collection of short piano pieces called ‘The Seasons’ The pianist is Mikhail Pletnev. Thanks again for listening.