Tchaikovsky & Bloch

Description

Although Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky is generally seen as belonging to the Western-orientated Russian school, as indeed are most of his professional colleagues in Moscow, his musical art was not in fact very far removed from the ideals of the so-called 'Mighty Five' (or 'Mighty Handful'.) In 1869 he met Balakirev, the actual founder of this national school in Petersburg. Balakirev recognized the young Tchaikovsky's talent and would ideally have liked to include him in his group. But the greatest problem as he saw it was that Tchaikovsky had received a formal conservatoire education, and that clashed with his ideals of an uncultivated, original Russian music. Ernest Bloch belongs to the large group of twentieth-century composers who, though not wishing to be associated with the avant-garde, equally did not distance themselves from the latest developments. He studied violin and composition in his native city Geneva, and later in Brussels and Frankfurt. His early compositions reveal a great curiosity about everything that was new and unknown at the time: Wagnerian chromaticism, the orchestral expansivity of Richard Strauss, and then the subtle timbres of Debussy and the block chords of Stravinsky.