Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now
Sonic Grade: B? C?
[Reviewed many years ago, so take what you read here with a grain of salt. Our standards are a lot higher than they used to be, and if yours are too, best to stick with the Shaded Dog pressings for albums such as this one.]
This Cisco 180 gram LP has very good sound. The original Shaded Dogs tend to be warmer and sweeter, but also more compressed and a bit smeary. This pressing is alive and present, although the string tone can be a bit steely at times.
If you have a warm, tubey system this record may just be the ticket. If your system leans toward the dry and analytical, this is not the record for you.
Be that as it may, the PERFORMANCE IS KING HERE — one of the best ever recorded, more powerful and more emotional than any I know. This orchestra is on fire with this stirring music. If you haven’t heard Munch’s definitive performance, you haven’t really heard the Serenade for Strings. This is your chance to hear string playing that will have you sitting up in your chair, transfixed by the energy and enthusiasm of the Boston Symphony strings.
Expert Commentary
[T]he “artistic qualities” of the work were perceived from the very first time it was heard in public. The Serenade received its premiere performance in St. Petersburg, under the direction of Eduard Nápravník on October 30, 1881, when it was an instant success. Rubinstein – who six years earlier had devastated the composer when summarily pronouncing that the First Piano Concerto was “ill-composed” and “unperformable” – had nothing but praise for the work, declaring it “Tchaikovsky’s best piece”; he also enthusiastically told Jurgenson: “You can congratulate yourself on the publication of this opus.” Since then the Serenade has been continually acclaimed for its poise and lyric beauty.
In his conception of the Serenade, Tchaikovsky envisioned a work which falls somewhere between a symphony and a string quintet. The work is as personal as any of the composer’s symphonies and as intimate as his chamber music. In it, Tchaikovsky also pays tribute to his musical idol, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who composed more than a dozen Serenades of various proportions and instrumentation.
Ileen Zovluck
ClassicFM.com
At the very time that Tchaikovsky was composing his nationalistic, powerful and undeniably noisy 1812 Overture, he was also writing this: the graceful, poised and rather sedate Serenade for Strings.
‘It is a heartfelt piece and so, I dare to think, is not lacking in real qualities,’ Tchaikovsky confided to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck.
The composer had recently rediscovered Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the time and deliberately set out to imitate Mozart’s style in the first movement. It doesn’t sound much like Mozart – it’s probably more the kind of music Tchaikovsky thought he would have written had he been around in Mozart’s era.
The second movement, a Valse, has become a popular piece in its own right and features one of Tchaikovsky’s best melodies. At its premiere, the movement had to be repeated. Tchaikovsky’s former teacher Anton Rubinstein declared it Tchaikovsky’s best piece.
Now considered one of the late Romantic era’s definitive compositions, the Serenade has also been taken up as music for the ballet and films. The waltz movement was arranged for soprano and full orchestra for the 1945 musical Anchors Aweigh. It also rather bizarrely – and accidentally – accompanied the final countdown for the Trinity atomic bomb test July 16, 1945, when it was being broadcast by a radio station on the same frequency being used to transmit test communications.
Elgar: Introduction and Allegro for Strings
The position of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings in his composing life is quite striking.
It was written after the Enigma Variations, after Sea Pictures, and after the Pomp and Circumstance Marches Nos.1–3, but before his period of self-doubt following the composition of his Symphony No.2, a time of endless soul-searching about whether he was ‘composed out’.
When it came actually to writing it in 1905, it involved a typically Elgarian method of composition. Elgar used numerous notebooks, which he kept with him at all times, for those moments when the muse struck. For this work, he dipped into his jottings and borrowed something that was dated four years earlier.
It had come from a rather bracing walk along the Cardiganshire coast, when he had heard a distant choir, and he had stashed it away for a possible ‘Welsh Rhapsody’ of some sort. In the end, the Welsh piece never came, so he borrowed the tune for this work, which features both a string quartet and a string orchestra. It was written originally for the strings section of the fledgling London Symphony Orchestra, from an original suggestion by his publisher, Jaeger.