BY 1967 I was addicted to Tchaikovsky’s last three symphonies, numbers 4 to 6. At that point I knew nothing of the first three symphonies. I was also hooked on the Violin Concerto and the First Piano Concerto. I didn’t care much for the composer’s ballet music: it sounded very pretty but episodic in a deadly way, and the nearest I got to it was my own hammered-out version of B Bumble and the Stingers’ Nutrocker. But those three symphonies blew me away. There was never any intellectual engagement – it was pure romance, total passion, with dashes of exhilaration, acres of melancholy and intense reflection and, in the breath-stopping close to the finale of the Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique, surely a representation of the final heartbeats of life.
My devotion to the music was unshakable. The intellectual bit of me was well under way with a lifelong addiction to Beethoven (which thrives). But the heart pounded to the symphonic music of Tchaikovsky. I loved the seductive melodies, the rich colours of his harmony and the rhythms of his music, which had explosive potential. And I adored its very Russian-ness.
In 1971/72, by now a second-year undergraduate studying music, my deep belief in and love of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic music was under assault. Suddenly I was being told of myriad weaknesses to his music in symphonic terms. He couldn’t build a proper, coherent and integrated symphonic structure for toffee. Lest I doubted the assertion, Tchaikovsky’s own words would confirm it. To my horror, they appeared to do just that. In his late thirties, Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness, commenting that his weakness was in the “management of form”, that he had been “careless” in the critical organisation of his sketches. And he wrote that “consequently my ‘seams’ showed and there was no organic union between my individual episodes”. And with this, Tchaikovsky handed a loaded gun to critics of his music. Teachers and lecturers have had a field day with it. I was shocked; and maybe somewhat bruised. But I also got a bit bloody-minded about it and determined that my passion for these great symphonies would just have to become a private passion, and an armour-plated one at that. That determination was reinforced by the release in 1972 of a three-LP recording of the last three symphonies on EMI in performances by the Berlin Philharmonic with Herbert von Karajan conducting. It was (and is) an astounding set of performances. My dad had snapped up the boxed set for a bargain. I still have it, with the price sticker on the front of the set that makes me smile.
At the time, in 1972, I had an informal chat with one of my teachers, the late and legendary Ian Kemp, a man of seminal influence, who had put everything about Tchaikovsky into perspective with a single, devastating sentence with which he had introduced a lecture on the composer. Though I remember that sentence to its very inflection, I won’t reproduce it verbatim: it was rude. But basically Ian advised me not to think or worry about musical structures, because everything relevant to understanding Tchaikovsky’s life and music flowed from his homosexuality, be it frustration, suppression, exhilaration or passion. Moreover, Ian seemed to imply, the volatile emotional intensity and passion of the music itself overflowed conventional structural boundaries of symphonic form.
And I have grown absolutely to believe that about Tchaikovsky’s symphonic music. Once a really good performance of any of these three symphonies gets the bit between its teeth and gets going, it’s unstoppable. And there are no bumps, no clunky changes. Not even the most defined structural buttresses in the typical Austro-German symphonic species will function as a hurdle or an impediment to the flow and forward momentum of a Tchaikovsky symphony at white heat.
And there are loads of performances of these symphonies coming up next season, as well as some less-familiar works, including the Manfred Symphony. You can find them now in next season’s brochures, all on sale. I’m always being asked: “What’s the best?” “What’s your favourite?” And so on. Without hesitation or qualification, every time I will go straight to my treasured recording of the Fourth Symphony, the piece dominated by Fate and considered by many music lovers to be Tchaikovsky’s autobiographical symphony. I have an incredible performance of it in a 20-volume CD set issued on the old Russian Melodiya label, boxed and reissued in the mid-90s by BMG. The boxed set is entitled Mravinsky Edition and features Yevgeny Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic. The Fourth Symphony, recorded in 1957, is on volume 18. I have not heard playing like this. Ever. Mravinsky rips the lid off the piece. And what he unleashes is terrifying.
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