Romantic Period

Semyon Bychkov on “The Tchaikovsky Project”

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This weekend, Russian conductor Semyon Bychkov leads the New York Philharmonic in a festival called Beloved Friend: Tchaikovsky and His World. It’s a small piece of The Tchaikovsky Project, which includes a cycle of recordings, released on the Decca label, featuring Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic. In a recent interview, Bychkov talked about the project with Richmond Public Radio’s Mike Goldberg. Released in October, The Tchaikovsky Project’s first recording begins at the end of the composer’s output with …

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A Flash of Operatic Drama in Chopin’s Second Concerto

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There’s a strange flash of operatic drama in the middle of the otherwise dreamy second movement of Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2. It’s a moment which caught my attention recently, while I was playing this piece in the orchestra. Chopin, the Polish virtuoso pianist and Romanticist, isn’t a composer we often associate with opera. But, while living in exile in Paris, following Poland’s unsuccessful 1830 November Uprising against the Russian Empire, Chopin frequently attended …

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Grande Pièce Symphonique: Franck’s Symphony for Solo Organ

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On Monday we listened to César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, a piece in which the orchestra turns into a living, breathing pipe organ. Now, let’s finish the week with Franck’s Grande Pièce Symphonique, which can be described as a symphony for solo organ. When this piece was completed in 1863, Franck had just been appointed organist at Paris’ Sainte-Clothilde basilica, where he played a brand new instrument by the master French organ builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. Grande Pièce Symphonique is …

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Franck’s Symphony in D Minor: Music of a Solitary Dreamer

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Franck went through this life as a dreamer, seeing little or nothing of that which passed about him, thinking only of his art and living only for it. True artists are subject to this kind of hypnotism – the inveterate workers, who find the recompense of their labors in the accomplished fact, and incomparable joy in the pure and simple toil of each day. This is how music critic Philip Hale described …

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The Restless Final Coda of Bruckner’s Eighth

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Here is the final movement of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 in C minor, performed in 2000 by the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Günter Wand. The clip below proves that conducting goes far deeper than flashy gestures. The 88-year-old Wand employs the most simple, economical means and Bruckner’s music leaps to life with an awe-inspiring, titanic power. The best Bruckner performances can rise to the level of mystical events, and this …

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New Release: Lisa Batiashvili plays Tchaikovsky, Sibelius

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Georgian-born violinist Lisa Batiashvili’s newest album offers a surprisingly fresh take on two standard pillars of the violin repertoire- the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius Concertos. Batiashvili is joined by conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin on this Deutsche Grammophon recording. Batiashvili’s interpretation of the Tchaikovsky is full of fluid tempo changes. It’s generally more contemplative than the classic performances of Heifetz and Oistrakh. (For example, listen to the burning intensity just below the surface of the second movement’s hushed stillness or …

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Roméo et Juliette: Berlioz’ Dramatic Symphony

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…Here a new world is opened up to view, one is raised into a higher ideal region, one senses that the sublime life dreamed of by poets is becoming a reality.  This is how Hector Berlioz described the dramatic potential of a bold new kind of symphonic music- a free-spirited Romanticism born out of the earth-shattering monumentality of Beethoven’s Ninth, which left behind classical balance and order to enter dark, new psychological …

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