Release Date: 12 January 1999
Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 4891030506442
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: TCHAIKOVSKY
Description
Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893)Suite No.1 in D Major, Op. 43 Suite No.2 in C Major, Op. 53 "Caracteristique"Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky belonged to the first generation ofRussian composers to have the undoubted advantage of professional musical training at theConservatory in St. Petersburg, newly established by Anton Rubinstein, under the patronageof the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. Abandoning the career intended for him, as anofficial in the Ministry of Justice, he turned to music, and followed his studies withemployment on the staff of the new Moscow Conservatory, directed by Nikolai Rubinstein,brother of the founder of the institution in St. Petersburg. Diffident in character, andsubject to acute nervous depression, he suffered considerably from an unfortunatemarriage, contracted in 1877 in an ingenuous attempt to conceal his own homosexualinclinations, a match followed by immediate separation and divorce.For some years Tchaikovsky enjoyed the moral and financialsupport of a rich widow, Nadezhda von Meck, a woman he was never to meet, although hestayed at her estate in Brailov during her absence. Her help allowed him to withdraw fromthe drudgery of teaching at the Moscow Conservatory and to devote himself to composition.With her he continued to exchange letters which reveal something of the thoughts andfeelings behind the music he was writing.It has been suggested that Tchaikovsky's death, in 1893, wassuicide, forced upon him by a court of honour of former students of the School ofJurisprudence, to avoid a threatened scandal, resulting from a liaison with the son of anobleman. Whatever the truth of this, the official cause of death, announced as cholera,enabled his passing to be mourned as it should have been, his achievement in Russian musichaving become increasingly apparent at home and abroad. Tchaikovsky might have appeared toVienna critics such as Eduard Hanslick as irredeemably Russian. At home, however, he worea much more cosmopolitan air than the group of avowedly nationalist composers with theirself-appointed leaders Balakirev and Cesar Cui, declared enemies of the Rubinsteins andthe "German" training offered by the Conservatories.In the aftermath of his marriage Tchaikovsky had taken refugeabroad in the autumn of 1877. The following year he was again in Russia, resolved to leavethe Conservatory, not least because of hints in the press about his private life. In Mayhe was at the estate of Nadezhda von Meck, where he returned in August, busying himselfwith the composition of a suite, allegedly in the style of Franz Lachner, a contemporaryand friend of Schubert in Vienna, a composition on which he continued to work at hisbrother-in-law Lev Davidov's Verbovka estate. Later progress on the suite was interrupted,to be continued abroad, in Florence, where his patroness had provided an apartment for hisuse. The suite underwent various changes, before it took its final shape. Tchaikovsky hadsecond thoughts about the prevalence of duple
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Z Tylsar
Zagreb F
Worceste
