Tchaikovsky Alpesh Chauchan

Alpesh Chauhan’s début recording for Chandos – Tchaikovsky: Orchestral Works, Vol. 1 (CHSA 5300) – met with widespread critical acclaim and awards, including recording of the week for both The Times and Presto Music, and the BBC Music magazine’s Orchestral Choice. This second volume – with the same forces – offers equally crisp and attentive playing from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, in another album that mixes well-known and less-heard Tchaikovsky. Three purely orchestral works form the core of the programme: Fatum (an early concert piece inspired by and dedicated to Balakirev), Hamlet (the last of his Shakespeare-inspired pieces), and Capriccio italien. These are interspersed with works conceived for the theatre: the Introduction to his opera The Queen of Spades and excerpts from The Oprichnik (an early opera) and The Snow Maiden (incidental music for a play by Ostrovsky).

Bernard Haitink’s 1980 Manfred was the prize of his Concertgebouw/Tchaikovsky symphony cycle. Riccardo Chailly’s 1987 effort with the same orchestra, while very good, doesn’t quite live up to that standard. In both recordings you get the sense that Tchaikovsky composed Manfred expressly for the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The very sound of the ensemble in its own hall conjures the dark, fantasy world described in the music. To this add lively and colorful playing, rich sonority, and utterly impeccable musicianship and you’ve got a uniquely compelling aural experience. Where the performances part company is in Haitink’s embrace of Tchaikovsky’s passionate dramatic ethos, a quality that Chailly, by contrast, tends to shy away from. (Of course, for a truly passionate reading you have to hear Muti’s rendition on EMI.) In his favor Chailly does have Decca’s vivid, high-impact digital recording, which, though having less warmth than the analog Philips production, better conveys the massiveness of the Concertgebouw Hall’s acoustics.

There is a tradition among Russian composers to write an elegiac trio in memory of a departed friend. It is Tchaikovsky who first introduced this tradition with his grandiose trio in A minor dedicated to Nikolay Rubinstein. Dmitry Shostakovich carried this tradition into the twentieth century with his Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67, dedicated to the memory of his closest friend the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky. These are the two telling works performed here in their premiere recording by the Rachmaninoff Trio de Montréal

There are several reasons to own this Vox Box 2CD set. For the first, it includes five great violin concertos in some of the very best performances in their discography. For the second, Ivry Gitlis (born 1922) is a great living violinist and these recordings made in early 1950s show his art in the best way, when Ivry's violin sounded powerful and brilliant.

Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, universally known as the Pathétique, is among the most deeply moving and profound of all works. An enduring masterwork which Tchaikovsky considered to be his greatest composition. Once again the struggle against ‘fate’ is central to this symphony which was to be the last Tchaikovsky wrote. The première took place in October 1893 at St. Petersburg and just eight days later the composer was dead. Few farewells in music are more poignant.