Word: tchaikowsky
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There has been a lot of resurrecting going on lately. Dmitri Mitropoulos uncarthed the Mahler First Symphony, and played it over the air. Igor Stravinsky conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Tchaikowski's Second Symphony last weekend, and next Sunday Bruno Walter expects to dust a few cobwebs from the Bruckner Eighth. All of which means that an increasingly mature music public is starting to demand its share of lesser-known, lesser-played works. Having been fed for the past decade on a staple diet of symphonic roast beef-the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies, Wagner excerpts, Von Weber overtures...
...literature. It is true, of course, that classical and pre-classical music exists largely in small forms, unfit for the symphony orchestra. But there are over a hundred symphonics by Haydn, suites from Bach, Telemann, and Handel. Why should we be forced to listen to ten performances of the Tchaikowski Pathetique for every one of the Mozart E-flat? Is it because classical music is comparatively quiet and unexciting that it is so neglected? The E-flat symphony is, in my opinion at least, a greater masterpiece than the Pathetique. Into its simplicity of form is poured a poignancy...
Soloists are about as uncooperative as possible in the matter of bringing music into performance. The average soloist would much rather do a concerto like the excessively hard-driven. Tchaikowski Piano Concerto because it is brilliant and showy, and leave it to an occasional Casadesus or Iturbi to do Mozart wrote about twenty-six concertos in all, of which at least half la dozen are among the world's greatest in the form. But one would never know this from what is played in concert. One would remain equally unacquainted with the extraordinary beautiful Schumann concerto. Instead one gets things...
...composer, and to himself, each of which must be fulfilled without infringing on the others. First of all, a conductor is bound to play a number of works from the standard repertoire, but he must not, certainly, subject his audience to a steady diet of Beethoven's Fifth, Tchaikowski's Pathetique, and the New World Symphony. Of course, there are always younger listeners for whom a playing of these favorites is a new and exciting experience. On the other hand, conductors do not take enough for granted, such as the fact that the present-day concert audience...
Several weeks ago many readers were offended by a sentence in this column which, without explanation, dismissed the Brahms symphonies as "academic exercises". What I meant by the statement is this: when one listens to a Tchaikowski symphony, such as the Fourth or Fifth, one follows easily and clearly the tonal pattern. Contrasting themes grow naturally out of each other, and there is a sense of inevitability about the working-out of material, a smooth flow and a feeling for clarity and balance. One gets none of this feeling from a symphony like the Brahms First. Here there...