Inside Classical: Life, Love and Tchaikovsky

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Inside Classical

Performances & Events

Music: Classical

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

BBC orchestras and guests perform in some of the UK's most prestigious concert halls.

The BBC's orchestras are joined by world-renowned singers and musicians at some of the UK's most beautiful concert halls, performing the best in contemporary and classical music.

Series 1

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Georgia Mann

Marta Gardolinska

Johan Dalene

BBC National Orchestra of Wales

Inside Classical: Series 1: Life, Love and Tchaikovsky

Life, Love and Tchaikovsky

BBC Four - Inside Classical, Series 1, Life, Love and Tchaikovsky

BBC NOW perform the works of composers Bacewicz, Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn.

Marta Gardolinska conducts the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in Bacewicz's Overture and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Johan Dalene joins them to perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto.

The BBC National Orchestra of Wales perform on home ground at Hoddinott Concert Hall in the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, under the baton of one of the world's most exciting young conductors, Marta Gardolinska. 

The concert fittingly opens with the Overture by trailblazing Pole Grazyna Bacewicz, a celebrated female composer who wrote this work in 1943 when her country was under Nazi occupation. The sense of struggle and combat is heard within the piece with the opening rumble of the timpani, the beat of the snare drum and the brass section playing fanfares. The work also contains a musical message of hope, with the Morse code for ‘V’ (dot dot dot dash), beaten out on the timpani during the piece, symbolising victory.

Following Bacewicz's Overture, the orchestra welcomes BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Johan Dalene to perform Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor. Swedish-born Johan, who is 20 years old, began playing the violin when he was four and made his concerto debut three years later. Mendelssohn wrote the Violin Concerto in E minor for his friend Ferdinand David, and the piece has become treasured by soloists and audiences worldwide for its lyrical melodies, fine craftsmanship and charm.

The concert ends with the orchestra performing Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony in F minor. Tchaikovsky made a start to his work on the symphony following his catastrophic marriage, which lasted just two months, to his former student Antonina Miliukova. Emerging from a profound period of writer's block, struggling with his sexuality and battling with a heavy bout of depression, it's perhaps unsurprising that the music is urgent, supercharged and, at points, violent.

Presented by Georgia Mann.

Inside Classical: Series 1

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