REEMERGENCE: TCHAIKOVSKY’S FIFTH SYMPHONY

Jessie Montgomery (b 1981), a native New Yorker educated at Juilliard and New York University, is an ASCAP Award-winning composer and violinist. In 2021, she served as composer-in-residence for the Chicago Symphony. Her works have been commissioned by the National Choral Society, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are known for reflecting a broad scope of influences from modern jazz through Zimbabwean dance and renaissance ensemble music.

Although premiered as an encore for the Sphinx ensemble, Montgomery envisioned “Starburst” as a fanfare, the role it serves on this program. In a verbal program note on YouTube, she explains her intent to explore the “colors, articulations, and gestures that are unique to the string ensemble,” to produce an effect that is “explosive, celebratory, fiery, and energetic.” To this can be added “bold” and “playfully outgoing.”

In marked contrast to “Starburst,” Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s first of three piano concertos explores the somber tension of internal conflict. Hans von Bülow, noted pianist and conductor, premiered the work at a time when many Russian intellectuals saw his music as too strongly influenced by Western Europe. Nationalism, the recognition of music from the composer’s own cultural heritage, was the order of the day. But performers like von Bülow, patrons like Nadezhda von Meck, and advocates like famed writer Fyodr Dostoevsky promoted the continental inclusiveness of his works as a positive trait. Unlike many composers, these accolades made it possible for Tchaikovsky to achieve success in his own time.

This piano concerto, with its unusually short introduction, is one of the most famous of all time due, in part, to its later use in a variety of popular culture settings. Composed in 1875, it has since been heard as the theme music of Orson Welles’ radio series, in a comedy sketch by Monty Python, in the film Misery, and in cartoons for Merrie Melodies and Spongebob Squarepants. But despite these sometimes light-hearted treatments, often stereotyping music of the Romantic era, the concerto remains a powerful work with deeply passionate emotional resonance. The first movement successfully joins folk songs from both his native Russia and from Ukraine, using standard classical forms undergirded with the  progressive harmonies that had earned him criticism from some Russian nationalists.

The second movement begins with the delicacy of a flute solo, the piano smoothly joining in the lovely pastoral mood that, appropriately, features the woodwinds. It is here that Tchaikovsky’s signature control of tone color shimmers its brightest.  The third movement takes off, repeatedly returning to its con fuoco and con vivo, “fiery” and “lively” themes from lyrical breathing spells. The entire concerto foreshadows the tenderness and strength that would grow even further nearly twenty years later in 1892’s Nutcracker.  

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, like Beethoven’s symphony of the same number, is one of the most challenging and rewarding in the symphonic repertoire. Both keep the traditional four-movement form.  One major, and rather unusual, similarity to Beethoven’s fifth is Tchaikovsky’s use of a theme that occurs in all four movements. And, like Beethoven, he uses the third movement to walk away from tradition:  Mozart and Haydn usually wrote elegant minuets, Beethoven kept the same ABA form, but changed styles to the energetic scherzo. Tchaikovsky also kept the form, but used the waltz, the most prominent dance of his era, as his third movement, ending with a dynamic finale moving from twilight to fireworks in the depth of night—a fitting complement to the Jessie Montgomery’s fanfare that opens this program.

–Dr. Yvonne Kendall, © 2022