The Cleveland Orchestra
Part of: Carnegie Hall Live on WQXR
Performers
The Cleveland Orchestra
Franz Welser-Möst, Music Director and Conductor
Program
STRAVINSKY Pétrouchka (1947 version)
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 5
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission. Please note that there will be no late seating before intermission.Listen to Selected Works
At a Glance
In 1924, Igor Stravinsky lovingly referred to his compatriot Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky as “the most Russian composer of all the musicians in my country.” Though Tchaikovsky had passed before the turn of the century and Stravinsky was by then fostering a more international—and expressively neutral—Neoclassical style, his admiration was still evident. Four years later, Stravinsky’s music for the 1928 ballet The Fairy’s Kiss would pay direct homage to the elder composer.
The 1911 ballet Pétrouchka provides an aural bridge between Stravinsky’s early, more Russian-influenced style and his burgeoning modernist style, the latter of which would come to the forefront in the shocking rhythmic pulsations of The Rite of Spring two years later. Russian folk songs still abound throughout this melodious score, as do moments of intense, biting dissonance (particularly in the music that depicts the lovesick puppet Pétrouchka).
Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, on the other hand, represents the pinnacle of Russian Romanticism, a dramatic work that opens in stormy introspection, winding through a tumultuous emotional landscape before arriving at a triumphant end point. Tchaikovsky was not convinced by the work at first—“There is something so repellent about such excess, insincerity, and artificiality,” he wrote—but he later came around, and it is now celebrated as one of his greatest creations.
To hear both of these composers on the same program is to hear two opposite yet interconnected poles of Russian symphonic music—one which revels in the sounds of a bygone era, the other which looks eagerly toward the future.
—Kevin McBrien