Cho’s Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky’s War Symphony

About the Work

Few of the world’s best-loved concertos had so unpromising a birth. Tchaikovsky composed his First Piano Concerto over the winter of 1874–75, and on Christmas Eve 1874 he played it through for Nikolai Rubinstein, the most powerful pianist-administrator in Moscow and the man he hoped would premiere it. Rubinstein’s response, as Tchaikovsky later recalled in a wounded letter, was devastating: the concerto was ‘worthless and unplayable’, bad, vulgar, beyond rescue. Stung but defiant, Tchaikovsky declared he would not alter a single note, withdrew the dedication, and offered the work instead to the German pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who pronounced it ‘so original and noble.’

So it was that this most Russian of concertos received its first performance not in Moscow or St Petersburg but in Boston, on 25 October 1875, with Bülow as soloist: about as far from home as the music could travel. It was an immediate success, and its popularity only grew. Rubinstein himself, to his credit, later came round, took the concerto into his own repertoire and played it many times across Europe.

The irony of Rubinstein’s verdict is that the concerto’s supposed faults are exactly what audiences adore: its lavish melodies, its grand rhetorical gestures, its sheer generosity of feeling. Tchaikovsky wove folk material into it (a Ukrainian tune sung by blind street musicians shapes the first movement, and a Ukrainian spring song drives the finale), grounding the Romantic splendour in something earthier. The result is a piece of irresistible warmth and brilliance, and one of the cornerstones of the entire piano repertoire.

What to Listen For

The opening is one of the most famous passages in all music, and one of the strangest. Horns sound a summoning call, and the piano crashes in with massive rolling chords beneath a broad, soaring melody in the strings. It is music of overwhelming grandeur, yet Tchaikovsky plays a curious trick: this magnificent tune is in the ‘wrong’ key (D-flat major, not the home B-flat minor), it lasts only a few minutes and, astonishingly, it never returns. The movement proper begins afterwards, built from the nimble Ukrainian folk theme; listen for the long, glittering solo cadenza near its close.

The second movement (Andantino semplice) is a tender intermezzo: a solo flute sings a simple, dreamy melody that the piano takes up, before a sudden quicksilver middle section dashes past like a scherzo and the calm returns. The finale is a whirling rondo on a stamping Ukrainian folk tune, full of rhythmic drive. Keep listening for the moment, near the end, when the orchestra seizes a soaring lyrical theme and carries it to a blazing, triumphant conclusion, the concerto’s hard-won answer to its doubters.

About the Work

This symphony is a late change to the evening. When Joana Mallwitz had to cancel, her replacement, Dima Slobodeniouk, brought Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements in place of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler: a swap between two works that were both written in the shadow of dictatorship and war.

Stravinsky composed it in the United States between 1942 and 1945, on a commission from the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, and conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere on 24 January 1946. It was his first major work written after he emigrated to America. Stravinsky rarely admitted that anything outside music had shaped his compositions, but he called this one his ‘war symphony’ and described it as a response to the Second World War: the first movement, he said, was prompted by a documentary about Japanese scorched-earth tactics in China, and the finale by footage of goose-stepping German soldiers and the Allies’ mounting success.

The symphony is also built from salvage. The prominent piano part of the first movement comes from a piano concerto Stravinsky had left unfinished, and the second movement, where the harp comes to the fore, reuses music he began in 1943 for the Hollywood film The Song of Bernadette, a score that in the end went to Alfred Newman. In the finale the two instruments meet on equal terms.

What to Listen For

The first movement bursts in with a violent upward rush and hammered chords, and much of it is driven by jagged, displaced rhythms that recall The Rite of Spring thirty years on. Listen for the piano, used less as a soloist than as a percussive member of the orchestra, snapping out its figures against strings and brass.

The second movement (Andante) is a sudden change of light: slender, almost courtly music with the harp to the fore, first written for the vision of the Virgin in The Song of Bernadette. Its poise is all the more striking between the two outer movements.

The finale (Con moto) brings the violence back. After a short interlude, marching figures and blaring brass evoke the war footage Stravinsky described, piano and harp now sharing the spotlight, and the symphony drives to an abrupt, emphatic close.

About the Work

Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, first staged in Dresden in 1911, is a comedy of love and time set in the aristocratic Vienna of the Empress Maria Theresa. One of its delicious anachronisms is that it is awash with waltzes, a dance that belongs to nineteenth-century Vienna rather than the 1740s world the opera depicts, but which Strauss deployed gloriously to evoke a dreamlike, nostalgic ‘Vienna of the imagination.’ These waltzes, above all those attached to the boorish, comic Baron Ochs, give the opera much of its lilt and sparkle, and they were soon irresistible candidates for the concert hall.

Strauss himself drew two concert waltz sequences from the score so that this music could be heard on its own. This First Waltz Sequence (Erste Walzerfolge) stitches the great waltz tunes into a single continuous, richly orchestrated showpiece, and it has remained a favourite ever since: a glittering distillation of the opera’s charm that needs no knowledge of the plot to enchant.

What to Listen For

This is pure orchestral delight, and the pleasures are immediate. Listen for the way Strauss spins one waltz melody into the next, the music swirling and dipping with Viennese grace, never quite settling before another tune sweeps in. The orchestration is the marvel: shimmering strings, glinting harp and celesta, suave woodwind solos and warm horns, all handled with the effortless mastery of the man who was perhaps the greatest orchestrator of his age.

Keep an ear out for the lazy, lilting waltz associated with Baron Ochs: heavy-footed and self-satisfied, it is one of the opera’s signature tunes. Above all, savour the sense of bittersweet nostalgia that hovers over the whole piece: even at its most exuberant, this is music tinged with the awareness that the gilded world it conjures is already slipping into the past. The sequence builds, as a good Viennese waltz set must, to a sweeping, full-orchestra flourish.