Tchaikovsky: Nutcracker Suite

Rostropovich's Nutcracker Suite brings out the best in the Berliner Philharmoniker, and the great cellist gives a gorgeous account of the Andante cantabile for Cello and Orchestra on the B-side. Apart from much else, The Nutcracker reflects the love of travel that all his life struggled in Tchaikovsky with his deep attachment to his native land. The travels in The Nutcracker are fictitious, held up for our delight like highly coloured postcards that need not bear too much resemblance to reality. But for France and above all for Italy he felt a profound love, that Sehnsucht nach Italien which has affected Russians no less acutely than German Romantics. Modelling his ideas consciously on Glinka s Spanish pieces, Tchaikovsky wrote in 1880 his Capriccio italien in tribute to a country where he had had some of his happiest times. He was admittedly composing with an eye to popularity: he told his patroness Nadezhda von Meek that he expected the piece to have a fine future , and so it has. Collecting several Italian folk songs and street songs and bugle calls, he assembled them into a loosely constructed piece that, if hardly subtle, can in a fine performance take on a Verdian gusto which Tchaikovsky would have been the first to approve. The emotion captured in the famous Andante cantabile from his String Quartet No. 1 is of a far more personal kind. Staying with his sister in the country in 1869, Tchaikovsky overheard a carpenter singing a folk song. Struck with its beauty, he noted it down: ever since his childhood, which was spent in the depths of the country, he had loved the sound of Russian folk music. When he came to write his First String Quartet, Op. 11, in 1871, he incorporated the tune deeply Russian in its shifting metre and obsessively repeated intervals into the work as its slow movement. It has become popular in countless arrangements; but familiarity should not lead us to undervalue it. Probably never have I been so moved in my life by the pride of authorship , wrote Tchaikovsky in his diary, as when Lev Tolstoy, sitting by me and listening to the Andante of my Quartet, burst into tears. John Warrack

Price: $31.98