Peter Katin (piano)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
(Leader, Paul Beard )
Conductor, Sir Malcolm Sargent
Tchaikovsky Waltz : The Sleeping Beauty
7.37 app. Piano Concerto No. 2, in G
8.11 app. Symphony No. 6, in B minor
(Pathetic)
From the Royal Albert Hall , London Tickets may be obtained from the Royal Albert Hall or usual agents
Tchaikovsky wrote his second Piano Concerto in 1880 and dedicated it to Nicholas Rubinstein , who six years earher had forfeited the dedication of the famous Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor by his ferocious criticism of the work. What Rubinstein thought of the second concerto is not on record, though it hardly matters, for the world has long ago reversed his opinion of the first: so much so, in fact, that only during recent years has No. 2 managed to achieve its deserved share of popularity. Its long eclipse was no doubt due to the impossibility of regarding it as a satisfying sequel to the earlier work. Any such comparison is now realised to be beside the point, however, since.the Concerto in G belongs to an entirely different world: the bright and sparkling world of Tchaikovsky's ballet music, in which rhetoric and grandiloquence would be out of place.
The Sixth Symphony may be said to belong to a world of its own-that of the composer's personal tragedy. After completing it shortly before his death, in 1893, he confessed that there was a story behind it, but said ' it shall remain a puzzle for people to break their heads over.' The puzzle is by no means difficult to solve, since Tchaikovsky admitted that he had wept bitterly while composing it, and accepted his brother's suggestion for the sub-title ‘Pathétique’; moreover, when asked to set to music a poem entitled ' Requiem ' he refused on the ground that 'my last symphony is permeated with a similar mood.' The novel idea of placing the slow movemenf last, partly foreshadowed by Haydn in his ' Farewell ' Symphony and later taken up by Mahler for his valedictory Ninth Symphony, can only bear one interpretation: that this symphony was Tchaikovsky's despairing farewell to the world. Deryck Cooke