The BBC
Midland Orchestra
Leader, Alfred Cave
Conducted by Leslie Heward
Symphony No. 5, in E minor
1 Allegro con anima. 2 Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza. 3 Waltz: Allegro moderato. 4 Finale: Andante maestoso-Allegro vivace — Moderato assai e molto maestoso
Andante cantabile for strings
Prelude, Ecossaise, and Polonaise
(Eugene Onegin )
Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony
Tchaikovsky began his Fifth Symphony in June, 1888, 'with great difficulty', though inspiration seemed to come later', ', and finished it by the middle of August. Like its predecessor, the Fourth, it is dominated by a motto-theme stated at the very beginning-a theme that savagely interrupts the passionate love-song of the slow movement and falls like a melancholy shadow across the end of the waltz, but which is triumphantly transformed in the finale.
It has recently been pointed out that this motto-theme appears to have been borrowed from Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar, which he was re-studying at the very time he began the symphony.
The clue to the programmatic
' meaning ' of the motto-theme may therefore possibly lie in the words to which Glinka's phrase is set: ' Do not turn to sorrow (the hour of our re-union) '.