Tchaikovsky - time to rehabilitate?

[visualnickmos]

His string quartets by the Borodin Quartet on Melodiya are wonderful.

[aeolium]

I'm very fond of the chamber music, especially the three string quartets (excellently played by the New Haydn Quartet Budapest on Naxos).

I don't know his piano music at all well, and not much of it seems to be broadcast apart from The Seasons.

[cloughie]

Strains of the Nutcracker floating in from the next room as I type, someone must have switched over to Breakfast. Actually the complete Nutcracker generally gets a seasonal spin around here.



Likewise - some great live performances stick in the memory - Cotrubas' Tatyana in Yevgeny Onegin, Fonteyn and Nureyev in Sleeping Beauty, Dowell and Makarova in Swan Lake, Ida Haendel, Rostropovich (Rococo Vars.,), Queen of Spades with Gergiev and the Kirov inc. Gorchakova, Gilels in 1st concerto with Svetlanov.....

Lots of favourites. For home listening these days it tends to be chamber music and, very occasionally, one of my favourite discs, Olli Mustonen playing the Children's Album - a gem at 24 minutes that I've never heard on radio. I tend to leave the orchestral stuff for concerts these days.

Tchaikovsky's own particular blend of Romanticism and classicism is part of what appeals. By contrast I'm allergic to Rachmaninov, but that's another story.

PS love the tawny owl, cloughie!

Thanks Richard, hopefully a wise change of av!

The complete Nutcracker is a favourite of mine - LSO Previn LPs many years ago. Two recent acquisitions - downloaded Tchaikovsky Big box - from Vanguard catalogue which includes among others Stoki in No4, Monteux No5 and Romeo & Juliet plus some Abravanel in the Ballets. The other is the Ormandy Sony box of 12 cds (Sainsburys £17.99) which has the reconstructed 7th Sym and also 1/2/3/Manfred which to my knowledge have not previously appeared. Whilst I really like Rachmaninov I can understand the 'allergy syndrome' mine is Chopin's seemingly endless supply of solo piano music!

[teamsaint]

Thanks Richard, hopefully a wise change of av!

The complete Nutcracker is a favourite of mine - LSO Previn LPs many years ago. Two recent acquisitions - downloaded Tchaikovsky Big box - from Vanguard catalogue which includes among others Stoki in No4, Monteux No5 and Romeo & Juliet plus some Abravanel in the Ballets. The other is the Ormandy Sony box of 12 cds (Sainsburys £17.99) which has the reconstructed 7th Sym and also 1/2/3/Manfred which to my knowledge have not previously appeared. Whilst I really like Rachmaninov I can understand the 'allergy syndrome' mine is Chopin's seemingly endless supply of solo piano music!

all 16 Cds of it ?!

Now the Liszt detractors REALLY have something to worry about.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Liszt-Complete-Piano-Leslie-Howard/dp/B004G7FFF8/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1386155236&sr=1-1&keywords=liszt++complete+piano+music

99 of those babies.

[richardfinegold]

Tchaikovsky is one of my favourite composers, always has been ever since I can remember. In fact he's a desert island composer for me.

It's queer, that having said that, I play his music less often than I used to and he rarely gets a mention on the forum.

When I was a kid, his music seemed to be everywhere, even more than Beethoven's, now it's a rarity.

Is it not time to restore him, especially given our preference for music from the 1800s?

Lest he suffers the fate of Mendelssohn

He doesn't need a trip to rehab for me. Yesterday I listened to Dorati and the LSO in the Pathetique and spent a good hunk of the weekend listening to Winter Dreams and the Rocco Variations (Karajan/Rostropovich).
I also spent a lot of time listening in my youth to his music and then went through a spell of a few years where I generally avoided it, but I recovered from that years ago. I think it was more a case of discovering other composers who at that time were considered 1 step off the beaten track--in my case that was Mahler, Bruckner, Vaughn Williams, Elgar, Shostakovich and others--now that distinction probably has no relevance.

[Serial_Apologist]

all 16 Cds of it ?!

Now the Liszt detractors REALLY have something to worry about.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Liszt-Complete-Piano-Leslie-Howard/dp/B004G7FFF8/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1386155236&sr=1-1&keywords=liszt++complete+piano+music

99 of those babies.

I often wonder how some people manage to cram so much into their lives. Of course, they didn't have TV or the Internet in them days.

I have a certain mental image of the Tchaikovsky "sound" as swinging between pretty/camp/twee, grandiose and overwrought - which for me is a limited world. But whenever hearing previously unknown Tchaikovsky, it always strikes me how much of it doesn't sound in the least like I would associate with the composer, based on the above; rather I hear anonymous music, well crafted but usually rather uninteresting and lacking in character or definition. Much of the piano music is over-ornate and indistinguishable from Liszt, to me. And I agree with his own self-definition as a symphonist, that the seams always show.

[Roehre]

Nothing wrong with Tchaikovsky.
Love his music (apart from his operas, which I don't know but for Onegin), not all first league (especially the piano music), but generally worth to be heard frequently (and that IMO includes 1812, which has got a bad press, but in reality certainly is not a bad piece at all).
(It is remarkable that the "popular" concertos (piano 1 and violin) are "early works" and the "popular" symphonies are relatively "late ones", with Swan Lake an early and Nutkracker a late work).

[gurnemanz]

I ignored much of his stuff for several decades (as with Liszt) and over the last couple of years have enjoyed setting foot on less well-trodden territory such as

and

[Richard Tarleton]

Much of the piano music is over-ornate and indistinguishable from Liszt, to me.

The above-mentioned Children's Album is simplicity itself - the obvious comparison being with Schumann. As for Liszt, both the comparison and characterisation are way off. I don't want to derail Beef's thread, so will confine myself to saying that much of Liszt's finest solo piano music is structurally and intellectually rigorous, and austere in tone. They're not at all alike, it's impossible to make a generalisation like this if you know your Liszt. There's another generalisation for you

I've just heard more Nutcracker on In Tune, second time today.

[EdgeleyRob]

There's always loads of Tchaikovsky on CFM too,the usual BCs though.
I didn't listen to any Tchaikovsky for years but quite recently rediscovered the Symphonies.
I now appreciate how good they are,and how they influenced so many of the lesser known Russian composers that followed.

[BBMmk2]

I played his Symphonies Nos 1 - 3, recently. Mariss Jansons and the Oslo PO.

[Petrushka]

I wasn't aware that Tchaikovsky needed any rehabilitation. He's surely one of the handful of composers of whom everyone has heard even if they never listen to classical music.

Have to admit that I despair of the 3rd Symphony which I think is a total failure but the rest are undoubted masterpieces, including and especially Manfred.

The real under-rated work, though, in my opinion, is Swan Lake which has absolutely everything one could ask for and is a work of intense, dramatic tragedy on an epic scale. It isn't much heard in the concert hall complete and I'm surprised that more conductors haven't made extended excerpts from the ballet to keep the narrative flow as with Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Haitink did this in an unforgettable 1976 Prom and it was that performance that had me dashing off to the record shop to get the Rozhdestvensky highlights LP.

[Alison]

I'm really looking forward to getting the new Jarvi version of Swan Lake for Christmas following his Sleeping Beauty last year.

The Third Symphony received a lot of attention on the forum around the time of a Building a Library outing. A lovely work IMHO, quite deep in its way, and plenty of interesting points of interpretation arose.

[muzzer]

Have just ordered the Ermler complete version of Swan Lake. No spoilers pls. I like a bit of Tchai.

[Boilk]

Tchaikovsky is one of my favourite composers, always has been ever since I can remember. In fact he's a desert island composer for me.
It's queer, that having said that, I play his music less often than I used to and he rarely gets a mention on the forum.

No pun intended, eh?

I've often wondered, had he been born 100 years later, would he have composed a Manfred Mann Symphony?