Tchaikovsky: X-Treme!
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As a test of the new audio player, I am inserting a clip of one of my very favorite symphonies, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36. The excerpt is taken from the end of the coda in the last movement, marked “Allegro con fuoco”. What I love so much about this particular recording is the way Leonard Bernstein, conducting the New York Philharmonic, takes the accelerando mark seriously. This is uncommon in studio recordings, but almost all of Bernstein’s later records were made from live concert tapes, hence the whipped-up tempo. Ironically, his last recording of the Pathétique–also on Deutsche Grammophon–is distinctive for being one of the slowest ever, with the final movement almost twice as slow as any other on disc. A lesser artist would have been uniformly booed for such a thing.
Filed under: Music on July 9th, 2007 | No Comments »