Program
Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 (1888)
Andante — Allegro con anima
Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza
Valse. Allegro moderato
Finale. Andante maestoso — Allegro vivace
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 83 (1878–1881)
Allegro non troppo
Allegro appassionato
Andante
Allegretto grazioso — Un poco più presto
Performers:
The musicAeterna Orchestra
Conductor Teodor Currentzis
Details
In the concert programme of Teodor Currentzis and the musicAeterna Orchestra Pyotr Tchaikovsky will meet Johannes Brahms, almost like a century and a half ago. In 1888, in Leipzig, Brahms attended a rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 conducted by the author, and then the two composers spent a pleasant evening together. ‘Brahms’ manner is very simple, free from vanity, his humour jovial, and the few hours spent in his society left me with a very agreeable recollection’, Tchaikovsky wrote about his counterpart. Not everyone was lucky enough to get to know this sharp-tongued introvert from such a soft side.
Brahms and Tchaikovsky never liked each other’s work. Yet here’s the paradox — as time passes, the similarities in their works, which are so different from their own point of view, become more pronounced. The orchestra of both Russian and German composers is expressive, not pictorial, timbre colours and vivid effects are a tool, not a goal, for them. Both developed the traditions of classical symphonism, contrary to the modern ‘fashion’ for the subversion of the canons. Both are brilliant melodists. Both loved domestic genres, from the Viennese waltz to Hungarian or Russian dances. Finally, both Tchaikovsky and Brahms are masters of musical melancholy, sometimes brought to a tragic intensity, then gently shining through the brightest and most cheerful pages of their scores.
Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 is an example of such a line of thought. It is based on the leitmotif of the composer’s entire work: a man in the face of inexorable fate and inevitable death. The ‘theme of fate’ is musically incarnated in the funeral introduction, then runs as a leitmotif through all movements of the cycle, appearing in various guises in the delightfully melodious Andante cantabile, and in the whimsical Valse of the third movement, and, of course, in the Finale. The crushingly victorious, major-scale sound of the ‘theme of fate’ at the end of the symphony has been interpreted ambivalently for more than a century — either as the victory of man over fate, or as the triumph of invincible fate.
Brahms had completed his Piano Concerto No. 2 seven years earlier, in 1881. This is a kind of four-part symphony with a solo piano, epic in both scale and content, covering almost all emotional states of a human soul. There is room for landscape imagery, piercing pathos, and Hungarian motifs in the Concerto. The lyrical core of the work, the third movement of Andante, begins with a melody repeating the theme of a romance called ‘Yearning for Death’ (op. 86), published by Brahms simultaneously with the Piano Concerto No. 2.