Tchaikovsky Festival at the BPO -
by Jan Jezioro
The BPO presents two pairs of concerts featuring the music of the composer.
BPO music director JoAnne Falletta will be on the podium at Kleinhans Music Hall this weekend for two concerts entirely devoted to the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, a first for the orchestra in its 75 year history. Then, two weekends from now, on October 15 and 16, Maestro Falletta will present another pair of all-Tchaikovsky BPO classic series subscription concerts, this time with a decided BPO Pops flavor.
On Saturday, October 1 at 8pm and Sunday, October 2 at 2:30pm, the BPO will feature its premiere performances of a Tchaikovsky concerto for piano, the Piano Concerto No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. post. 75. Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto has appeared on BPO programs almost 20 times over the years, beginning in 1941, and is one of the most popular and often performed concertos in the entire repertoire. His Second Piano Concerto is much less often programmed, and its BPO premiere came as recently as 1998, with only one subsequent performance. The Third Piano Concerto began life as a symphony, before the composer abandoned the attempt to write it in 1893 and started to rework the music into a new concerto for piano and orchestra. Ultimately, Tchaikovsky abandoned all but the first movement of the work, and it was published posthumously, in 1894, as a single-movement Allegro Brillante. His last completed composition, that work is now better known as the one movement, Piano Concerto No. 3. The dynamic Italian pianist Fabio Bidini, an audience favorite both at Kleinhans and on the orchestra’s annual Florida tour, returns as the featured soloist.
The rarely programmed Sleeping Beauty Suite, Op. 66a, based on the popular ballet of the same name, has only been performed once previously by the orchestra, back in 2007 when Joanne Falletta was on the podium for its BPO premiere.
The big work on the program is Tchaikovsky’s stirring Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64, one of the composer’s three great, final symphonies. Like so many of the composer’s works, the initial critical reception of the symphony was indifferent, if not downright hostile, for reasons that are hard to fathom for modern classical audiences, as the piece now enjoys great popularity.
The Tchaikovsky celebration concludes with the BPO performances on Saturday, October 15 at 8pm and Sunday, October 16 at 2:30pm. Mark Kosower, Principal Cello of the Cleveland Orchestra, is the soloist in the always delightful Variations on a Rococo Theme for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 33. Tchaikovsky’s original score for the work was heavily revised, even recomposed, by Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, the 28 year old principal cellist of the Orchestra of the Imperial Russian Music Society in Moscow and professor at the conservatory there. When the score’s publisher contacted the composer, literally in horror with the liberties that Fitzenhagen had taken, Tchaikovsky, suffering yet again from one of his bouts of insecurity about his skills, allowed the changes to stand, even though a strong argument has been made by modern musicologists that the work, as originally written, is much more effective.
Each of the other three works to be performed has previously appeared on a Kleinhans classic series concert only once. Falletta was on the podium for the BPO premiere of the Polonaise, from the opera Eugene Onegin, in 2007, and former BPO music director Michael Tilson Thomas led the orchestra’s only previous performance of the very popular Serenade for Strings in C major, op. 48, in 1975. The program will conclude with the hugely popular 1812 Overture, a work that the BPO performs many times each season, on either Pops or outdoor summer concert programs. The only previous classic concert series of the 1812 Overture, however, occurred way back in 1936, during the BPO’s very first season, under its first music director, the Hungarian conductor Lajos Shuk.
Tickets and Information: 885-5000 or www.bpo.org
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